Make your digital customer journey a powerful tool in your brand building efforts
Ronald Griffin, Karl Cavalli-Björkman and Joachim Medalen of Nordic agency SEEN explain the benefits of video personalisation for brands, allowing them to reconnect with a disenfranchised modern audience.
Brands have more touchpoints with their audience than ever — yet they are struggling to engage and delight their customers at every step of their journey.
- 80% say they offer a “superior experience” – but only 8% of customers agree [1]
- Email open rates declined year-on-year from 22.02% to 21.15%[2]
- At the same time, email click-through-rates dropped from 3.43% to 2.13%
- Social media engagement is also declining. Facebook’s engagement rates dropped from 0.09% to 0.064%, and Instagram’s from 0.9% to 0.67%, between 2019 and 2021
That’s the bad news.
The good news is there is a proven solution to the customer journey problem: personalised video. From our real-world experience, the right personalised videos deliver an average click-through-rate of 38% and can reach CTRs as high as 74%.
So, what are the three core challenges for brands?
- Customers expect more personalisation from brands
Personalisation is a hot topic for a reason. As McKinsey[3] reports:
- 71% of consumers expect personalization from brands and businesses
- 76% of consumers get frustrated when they don’t find it
- 78% say personalised content makes them more likely to repurchase
Brands are catching on. Nearly 90% invest in some form of personalisation technology[4] and 51% of marketers say personalisation is their number one priority[5] . Yet despite these priorities and investments, brands fail to unlock the true potential of personalisation.
- Customer data is collected, but it's siloed and not being used effectively
Data drives every personalised customer journey. You need to know basic things about your customers — like their name, location, and last purchase — to personalise the steps in their journey and the content of the communications you send them.
Most brands are collecting the customer data they need to create personalised journeys and communications, but they are struggling to use this data. Only 34% of executives have a single view of their customer data[6] .
- Customer journeys are not focused on Gen Z
Customer demographics are changing. Gen Z has 68 million members — they make up 20% of the market and command $144 billion of buying power[7] . While they still use legacy tools like email, they engage with them less than past generations. In one study, only 53% of Gen Zers want to receive weekly emails from their favourite brands, compared to 66% of millennials[8] .
Each of these issues is bad enough on its own. Combined, they can be fatal.
To repair their customer journeys, brands must find new ways to communicate. Personalised video offers one way to do just that.
Video personalisation is not a “silver bullet” to every customer engagement problem. But when personalised videos are developed with care, attention, and at cinema-levels of quality, they correct the three main issues breaking today’s customer journeys.
- Creates an intimate, tailored experience
Personalised video creates a bigger emotional impact than personalised text, and personalisation meaningfully increases the performance of a video — personalised videos are 35% more likely to retain viewers compared to non-personalized video.
- Unifies and makes good use of CRM data
Personalised, data-driven video allows brands to combine video with existing customer data Common data-points include name, birthdate, location, purchasing history, interests, gender, professional role, and language, whilst creativity is the only true limitation of what data could be used to personalise a video.
- Speaks to Gen Z through their favourite channel — video
Gen Z consumes a massive amount of video. The average member of Gen Z streams 23 hours of video a week[9] , 71% watch directly from their phones, and most Gen Zers state they prefer video over other media (including music, gaming, and social)[10] .
Most important — personalised video delivers big, measurable results.
From our own real-world experience, personalised video creates significantly higher customer engagement rates than legacy personalisation tools like email.
At SEEN we create and distribute personalised, data-driven videos for leading global brands, including Lexus, AstraZeneca, Accenture, DNB, KPMG, and Red Bull. We have seen the results first-hand, and run independent tests to prove that personalised videos outperform other engagement methods.
We have found, measured, and proven that personalised video delivers:
- 3x higher conversions
- 5x more time with brand
- 7x higher engagement rates
As marketers we should all be leveraging the power of personalisation, in video or in any other form. The brands that connect with their customers on a personal level are set to outperform their peers, both in the short- and long-term.
[1] https://media.bain.com/bainweb/PDFs/cms/hotTopics/closingdeliverygap.pdf
[2] https://www.getresponse.com/resources/reports/email-marketing-benchmarks
[3] ¹ McKinsey & Company, Nov 12 2021 - Next in Personalization 2021 Report
[4] https://www.forrester.com/blogs/transform-your-personalization-strategy-at-forresters-consumer-marking-forum/
[5] https://www.wunderkind.co/blog/article/smarterhq-wunderkind-audiences/
[6] https://www.forbes.com/forbes-insights/our-work/data-versus-goliath/
[7] https://thrivemyway.com/gen-z-marketing-stats
[8] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/369851/consumers-want-funny-and-reassuring-emails-from-br.html
[9] https://thrivemyway.com/gen-z-marketing-stats
[10] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2022/01/27/tips-for-creating-a-tiktok-video-marketing-campaign-that-targets-generation-z/?sh=6b1b41126978
