Personalized Video Email Cuts Through the Clutter

We live in a world that’s in love with videos. Whether it’s on our phones, our Internet-connected televisions, our PCs and tablets or even on screens in public places, we just like to watch. We watch over six billion hours of online video each month, and (surprisingly) not all of them are funny cat videos.

We also like personalization. From the apps on our phone and the YouTube channels, we see to the way our Gmail inbox looks, we’ve gotten used to getting what we want and how we want it. Personalization is what engages us. Increasingly, it is also what SMBs are using to stand out in a crowded and noisy marketplace.

Email marketers are struggling to be heard today. The average office worker receives about 121 emails each day, according to the Radicati Group. To avoid “inbox anxiety” (yes, it’s a real thing), many recipients mercilessly cull their incoming email. Unsurprisingly, marketing emails are often the first to go.

To catch and keep more eyeballs, therefore, SMBs are using video as a tool in their email marketing campaigns. There is ample evidence that it’s working, too, provided the content is engaging.

Adding video to email can have a dramatic effect on click-through rates and revenue. A study by Forrester Research found that videos in email messages tend to increase click-through rates between 200 and 300 percent. Simply identifying that your email contains video can go a long way toward improving the effectiveness of a campaign; research by Cisco found that using the word “video” in an email subject line can increase open rates by anywhere from seven to 13 percent.

This gain from video in the email can be increased by marrying it with personalization that comes from your CRM.

Grab Attention with Personalized Video Email

Easy video creation mixed with a modern marketing automation platform such as Agile CRM gives SMBs the power to cut through the email clutter with personalized video. Video grabs reader attention, then personalization delivers relevancy and a wow factor that drives results.

The key with video email personalization is taking advantage of your CRM. When making your email campaign, you can segment your audience and record several versions of the video at the same time for more personalized video campaigns.

For instance, you might segment by geographic location, industry or where the recipient is located in the sales pipeline. You then can personalize your video for these segments, and add individualized personalization in the body of the email through mail merge on key fields such as first name and specific city or other criteria (custom fields in Agile CRM can be quite helpful for this purpose).

Ease of use also plays an important part in effective video email personalization, not just a thoughtful use of the contact data in your CRM. If including segmented, personalized video is not easy, it won’t be done. So equally important is an email marketing platform that makes video easy.

Agile CRM makes it easy for you to include video in your email campaigns by enabling users to upload or link to a video–or even record their video straight from the email campaign designer. This makes it easy to create and include personalized video in marketing messages, and Agile CRM comes with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop process for video inclusion.

Personalization Doesn’t Stop with Video

When thinking about personalization in your email marketing efforts, don’t stop with segmentation. You also can personalize your email marketing campaigns through interactive calls to action and follow-up automation that makes the customer journey individual, not just a single email.

The most effective marketing campaigns today are those that allow for a two-way experience. Many SMBs are experimenting with content that asks the user to do something in response to a marketing message (enter a code, text a message, share with a friend, etc.), and video email is no exception. A call to action in each video email – and a reward for those who answer the call — can help engage the target audience and even induce viewers to share your message with others. You can get creative by developing several different journeys for customers depending on segmentation and how recipients respond to this interactivity.

Marketing automation also expands the personalization of video email by allowing you to develop personalized follow-up campaigns based on recipient response and individual customer variables.

For instance, you might have a follow-up automation that sends a specific product recommendation email to the customer who opens your personalized video email and both clicks on a CTA and navigates to a specific product landing page. This automation also can alert a sales rep at the same time to schedule a follow-up call to close the sale.

Agile CRM and its powerful automation workflows allow your business to create If-then automations that factor in CTAs clicked, landing pages visited, customer data you’ve already collected and other factors such as lead score to create highly personalized, automated follow-up. This brings a further level of personalization (and effectiveness) to your email campaigns.

While video email and sophisticated personalization may not be right for every campaign, it’s certainly a useful tool for innovative businesses that want to stand out from the competition. Give personalized video email a try.