KITCHENER, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Getting your audience to pay attention to marketing emails is difficult in this era of crowded inboxes, but businesses including Act-On, Cetera Financial Group, Lenovo and Tradeshift are standing out from the crowd by using personalized video from Vidyard, the video platform that helps businesses turn viewers into customers.
By using personalized videos within email and content marketing campaigns:
- Act-On increased video engagement by 182 percent and time-on-page by 62 percent
- Cetera Financial Group saw a 600-percent increase in email click-through rates
- Lenovo boosted click-through rates by 4.5 times and open rates by 400 percent while re-engaging cold, unresponsive leads within their funnel
- Tradeshift increased page views by 231 percent
In a recent holiday email campaign, PC maker Lenovo more than quadrupled click-through rates compared to previous campaigns. Even more impressive: in a campaign to contact inactive recipients – people who hadn’t responded to the company in more than six months – 5 times as many people opened the personalized video emails compared to those that weren’t personalized.
“We expected personalized video to improve the results, but we were amazed by how effective it was,” said Michael Ballard, senior manager for digital marketing at Lenovo. “Personalization makes a huge difference for getting noticed in a crowded market.”
Business users sent and received on average 121 emails a day in 2014, and that is expected to grow to 140 emails a day by 2018. As much as marketers rely on email to reach their audiences, email campaigns don’t have a high success rate. Just 18 percent of marketing emails get opened, and recipients only click through 2 percent of them.
Personalized videos are customized to each individual recipient by seamlessly weaving unique information about them or their company right into the video. That could be something as simple as featuring their name, company name or job title at different points throughout a video or an image like a company logo or a picture of their website. In addition to personalizing the video itself, each recipient receives a personalized thumbnail image to drive greater engagement.
“Today’s marketers and sales teams face stiff competition for their audiences’ limited attention span,” said Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of Vidyard. “Video by itself helps their messages get noticed. Personalized video compels action. It gets people to watch, keeps them watching longer and creates a memorable experience that builds brand affinity.”
For marketing automation provider Act-On, personalizing its videos resulted in more recipients actually viewing the content. Nearly twice as many people watched Act-On’s entire personalized video than typically watched other videos of similar length. Those viewers also spent 62 percent more time than average on Act-On’s campaign landing page.
“Our customer success team is in love with it,” said Linda West, director of digital marketing for Act-On. “Personalization helped lead to more conversions on our email campaign, but it also kept them engaged longer with the message we were trying to deliver, which is what really matters.”
Tradeshift, the leading global supplier collaboration platform, saw its click-through rate increase by a factor of 10 for its personalized 2015 holiday campaign, as compared to a similar campaign in the previous year that did not feature personalization. In turn, it led to a 231-percent jump in page views and an 88-percent increase in e-book downloads over the previous campaign.
“The results we have seen with Vidyard's personalization capabilities have been remarkable,” said Denica Stoyanova, head of digital marketing and marketing operations at Tradeshift. “We understood it would have a positive impact on our engagement metrics, but the actual outcome was astonishing.”
Cetera Financial Group uses video content to capture the interest of new prospects and increase engagement in their lead nurturing programs. The rich video analytics provide new insights into customer behavior and their interest in Cetera’s services. During a recent email campaign featuring personalized videos, Cetera saw a 600-percent increase in email click-through rates.
“Besides the phenomenal metrics associated with personalized video, the technology is a real 'surprise and delight' for our customers that shows a level of sophistication associated with our brand,” said Eric Hansen, director of demand generation at Cetera Financial Group. "When you receive an email from a customer thanking you for making a video just for them, you know you've made a lasting impression."
As with other Vidyard video offerings, Personalized Video integrates with leading marketing automation and CRM solutions, including Salesforce, Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud and Act-On. Marketing and sales teams can easily track second-by-second video engagement data for each prospect and customer to improve lead scoring, segmentation and customer insights. Sales teams can generate personalized videos for targeted prospects and customers with the click of a button from right within Salesforce.
To learn more about Vidyard’s Personalized Video, visit here: https://www.vidyard.com/personalized-video
About Vidyard
Vidyard (Twitter: @Vidyard) is the industry’s leading video marketing platform that helps marketers drive results and ROI with online video content. With Vidyard, customers can add video to their websites in minutes, get real-time analytics, syndicate video to social networks and YouTube, create calls to action, optimize search engine hits, capture leads, and brand their player skins all from one place. Vidyard integrates with key marketing automation and CRM tools to deliver user-level video engagement data, turning views into sales.
