How Vidyard Harnessed the Power of Personalized Marketing Video

We all suffer from email overload sometimes, especially at certain times of year. Email marketing is getting more and more competitive. On a daily basis, your prospects are dealing with internal messages, sales emails, communications from vendors, and who knows what else. When combined with the ins and outs of daily life at home and work, it’s amazing these decision-makers have time to read anything at all. That’s why you need to do everything in your power to make sure that your message catches their eye, even with everything else that’s going on.

Mentioning Video in Email Increases Open Rates

In order to stand out in a busy inbox, you need to attract your readers with more than just a witty subject line. We know that including video as a call to action in the body of an email increases click to open rates by 53 percent over emails without an obvious mention of video content. Did you also know that mentioning a video in the subject line increases open rates from 7 to 13 percent? That’s almost double!

This is why our partner, Vidyard, asked us to help them with a video email campaign. But it wasn’t just any campaign. It was the holidays – a time when every single business was sending messages to their customers, not to mention wrapping up the fiscal year, and all that entails. Despite all of this chaos, Vidyard needed to make sure customers would actually read their email.

Vidyard’s Campaign Beats the Industry Norm by 20 Percent

To accomplish this, we took information already existing in Vidyard’s MAP to personalize a fun holiday video, which was sent to thousands of recipients. Check out an example of the 45-second video personalized for Tony below:

As you can see, the video had a huge impact because of the way it builds suspense. What’s in the package? Where is this going? The video ends with a direct appeal to the viewer. Then, once you actually start looking at the content, you realize the people in the video have been dropping hints the whole time as to what you would find there: Fresh, exciting, inspirational and stellar content that entices you to come back. In fact, this campaign was a precursor to the 12 Days of Video Marketing gifts that Vidyard entertained viewers with at the tail of last year. There was, indeed, an opportunity to get new insight into sales and marketing through the digital advent calendar, as well as the potential to win a new camera.

It’s cohesive, creative, and so fun.

Tyler Lessard, CMO for Vidyard, reported that early results showed a click-thru rate for this campaign was 2.1 times higher than the average CTR of similar email blasts in the past. In terms of engagement, 71 percent of viewers watched the video all the way through. That’s about 20 percent higher than the industry norm. The personalized video email worked.

Marrying Video’s Appeal with Email’s Reach

Mentioning personalized video in an email subject line significantly increases click-thrus. While Vidyard took the opportunity to execute this campaign over the holidays, personalized video is the perfect gift for customers and prospects year round.Personalized video is an unbeatable way to make a connection in a prospect’s inbox. Let’s face it, it can be tough to get prospects to open a message at the best of times. Mentioning a video gets prospects to open the email, but you get the best results when you have a truly awesome video at your disposal. We love the creativity of Vidyard’s campaign. Not only did it include a video personalized to each sender, but also 12 “presents,” or pieces of content to lead the prospect down the sales funnel.

Taking all of this into account, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the role Switch Merge plays in delivering powerful and personalized video email marketing campaigns – only simplified. Remember when mail merge was the greatest innovation to reduce the pain of customizing direct mail and email marketing? Imagine the freedom this would allow you by applying it to video. Engage with and nurture leads by injecting information they’ll identify with, such as their industry or job title. Generate buzz around upcoming events by targeting specific buyer segments. The applications are only limited by your creativity.

Takeaway

Personalization is a promise that many organizations make regardless of channel or type of content. But it takes significant effort to effectively put into practice. While video is an admittedly appealing type of media, it becomes transformational when you’re able to use it to speak to customers as individuals and make sifting through email marketing messages a delight instead of a time drain.