Personalised video is some sort of magic. Surely, only wizardry could put my name into this video in front of me? Pretty close.
Personalised video uses code to replicate previously entered data within a video – either data you already hold about someone in a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) or that they’ve submitted, for example, in a form. So, rather than your marketing or explainer videos being the same for everyone, each customer sees a version tailored to them.
That data isn’t limited to what you’d consider personalisation on the surface (like a name); it can use any data input to change what the viewer experiences, from their product order to their device model.
Why use personalised video?
It’s attention-grabbing
Personalisation grabs people’s attention. When you’re trying to stand out amongst the daily noise, even something as simple as using the viewer’s name can make a difference. It can be a bit startling but startling is far more effective than boring.
It’s helpful
Personalisation also aids understanding. Explaining how your product works using real-life examples based on your customer’s data can help them make decisions. Like buying your product.
It’s wide-reaching
Because a personalised video isn’t sitting static on a web page, it has a far wider use. You’re using the same work over and over, but getting fresh, new benefit from it each time.
This means you don’t even need to create different videos for different kinds of audiences, if you’re clever about it. By customising the video depending on the data, you can make a pick-your-own adventure video that will work for your whole customer base.
Although, of course, personalised video can be more expensive, it should be excellent value for money because of how flexible and impactful it is.
It’s money-making
Overall, personalisation in marketing can give you an average revenue increase of 19%, according to Hubspot. Wyzowl reports that 94% of users understand a product or service more after watching a video.
Put them together and what do you get? A 4.5x increase in click-throughs from a personalised video, according to Planable. That’s a super-hefty uplift in leads.
A word of warning: consider whether your audience is ready for this. If they’re not expecting to see their personal data appear within a video – which many people don’t even know is possible – they may find it intrusive. Use it carefully!
How does personalised video work?
While there are easy-to-use tools for creating basic personalised videos – like Videosmart – the long answer is something complicated involving Javascript, for a truly data-led video.
Your creative team or video agency can create the beautiful video, but you need the skills of a developer to integrate it. Airbnb developed an open source platform called Lottie to take After Effects videos and render them in real time.
This allows your platform to tell the video what data to display, either from an input the customer has completed (like a form), from background user data they’ve consented to you collecting or from your CRM or database.
How much does personalised video cost?
Video is quite hard to cost in general. However, I have found that the cost of an animated video set up for personalisation is pretty similar to any other – the crunch is in the dev time and expertise. If you have internal dev resource, any developer worth their salt will be able to figure it out with the tools available now.
It may take a little while to figure out how to implement personalised video from the data that you have access to, but the results are incredible. Set a dev on the problem and see if you could make it work for your business.
