How to Create Personalized Videos for Your Customers

Personalized videos are customized video content tailored to your customers based on their preferences, interests, demographics, purchases, or any other relevant data. They can be used as personal greetings, product recommendations, or advertising, and can significantly enhance your marketing content, engagement, and client outreach attracting and retaining new customers. In this article I will examine the benefits of using personalized videos in your marketing and why you should use them, how you can use them and automate them, as well as where the future of personalized videos is going.

What are the benefits of using personalized videos?

In general, personalization in marketing and dealing with clients and customers is a surefire way to help your business. There are multiple reasons for this, and most of them apply to videos as well, so let’s look at what advantages you can get by personalizing your videos.

Higher Engagement and Conversion Rates

Personalized videos can capture attention and resonate with viewers on a much higher level than generic videos. Research has shown that more than 90% of businesses that choose to use personalized videos see an increase in their conversion rates.

Appeal

Your customers likely love personalization. In fact, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when you use personalized marketing. So, making bespoke videos for your customers or clients can have a positive effect on how they view your brand and services and can result in increased sales.

Loyalty

Personalized videos can contribute to your customers’ loyalty towards your brand and awareness – they will feel seen and better understood and will be more likely to return to your products or services. In a Salesforce study from a few years ago, 65% of consumers claimed that personalization influences how loyal they will be to a brand. That number is probably even larger now, due to a higher level of personalization that customers expect because of how much easier it has become to achieve it with the help of AI and automation – something we will also touch upon in this article.

Increased Click-through Rates

As I have already mentioned before, by using video personalization in your marketing campaigns you can achieve up to an 8x increase in click-through rates. The benefits of having more people clicking on your advertisements or links are obvious and many, such as more traffic on your website or platform as well as a higher return on investment, making your marketing more efficient.

Data Quality

This might be a less obvious benefit of using personalized videos, but it can become crucial over time. Since personalized videos require data (whether that data is just you knowing what your customers like or an elaborate database you have accumulated), using them can incentivize your organization to improve data collection and analysis over time. This in turn can lead to more effective marketing strategies, even better video personalization, and can foster the future growth of your business.

What can you use personalized videos for?

Personalized videos are a powerful tool, and they are not really limited to any particular use per se. If you haven’t used videos yet to promote or support your business or platform, this is a good place to start and reap all those benefits that video personalization comes with. To get you started with some ideas, here are a few of the common uses of personalized videos:

Emails

One of the first things that might come to mind is using them in emails. You can enhance your email marketing by incorporating more precise targeting with personalization, or simply use personalization as a way to stay in touch with your customers or clients in a personal manner (invites, announcements, holiday messages, etc.), and increase engagement with material that would otherwise be ignored. Data shows that emails containing a personalized subject line can make people click on your links 27% more – now imagine what the effect of personalized videos could do.

Websites

You can also use personalized videos for your microsites and landing pages to welcome potential customers, showcase products, or simply to address your target audience in a way that will resonate with them. You can also make use of automation to personalize the experience for frequent users and clients.

Customer Service

Businesses and platforms can use personalized videos to make it easier for their customers and users to understand complex processes or products. This could reduce the workload of your customer support team and improve customer satisfaction. In fact, 71% of customers say that they expect personalized interaction from companies, and 76% say they are frustrated if this doesn’t happen, emphasizing the significance of engaging with customers on a personal level to enhance their experience and loyalty.

Sales

A sales representative can send personalized video messages to potential clients, addressing them by name and discussing needs or interests specific to them. Also, personalized videos can be used as follow-up messages, explanations of services offered, product demos, or as part of email campaigns to nurture and convert prospects.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

When paired with ABM, personalized videos can be quite powerful. You can make a bespoke video campaign for each one of your target accounts to make it more resonant and relevant to them. It can make it easier to address their unique pain points and show them only the content that is meaningful to them. And last but not least, it can make your clients feel more appreciated when they feel like you are addressing them and their needs specifically, rather than throwing a wide net.

Real World Examples of Video Personalization

While personalized videos can be used in almost any industry, I have compiled a few examples to show you how different industries and companies are utilizing video personalization. Here are a few examples:

Higher Education

Universities are increasingly starting to use personalized video technology for the betterment of the student’s journey, whether in the stage of admissions, studies, or alumni relations. This is partly due to the Gen Z-driven demand for more video, particularly interactive or personalized video. Check out an example of such a campaign from the New York Institute of Technology.

‍

Finance & Banking

Financial institutions can use video personalization to improve interactions with their clients. Norwegian banks DNB and Sparebank 1 Kreditt have sent thousands of personalized videos to their clients, making those interactions feel a little closer to a one-on-one chat. Barclays took it a step further by creating a large cross-selling campaign, where rather than just telling customers about the loans they offer, they decided to make a personalized video for their customers. The video included custom car plates and house names based on the customer's name, and even had the actress addressing the customer directly by saying their name – you can take a look at the video below.

‍

Real Estate

Realtors and real estate companies can use video personalization to send bespoke open house invites, highlight the most relevant features based on shopper’s preferences, create custom video tours for their prospective buyers, or create custom messages such as thank you notes and reminders. Indian real estate company Kalpataru Limited used AI to create personalized videos based on the stage of decision making their buyers were in. They used personalized variables such as their name and the property they were interested in and included stage-sensitive advice on how to take the next step.

‍

Travel & Hospitality

A great example of how video personalization can be used in travel & hospitality is a campaign by Delta. Using their frequent flyer data, they created a video that featured the customer’s name, how many miles they have flown, ranked them against other frequent flyers, told them how many countries and cities they have visited, what was the farthest they have flown, and other fun stuff to create a nostalgic excursion into the past. Online travel agency eDreams also had a similar personalized video campaign where they encouraged customers to make more purchases before their departures by addressing them directly in a promotional video.

If you want to see more usage cases, we have a whole article on personalized video marketing examples that you can check out. To bring it all together, here’s another stat for you – almost half of market leaders and executives surveyed by Forbes say that personalized content has directly increased their sales. Pretty good, right? Let’s see how you can jump in on the action in the next section.

How can you make personalized videos?

To simplify, there are three main roads you can take when you decide to create personalized videos. You can either

Record Them Yourself

Recording videos yourself has the benefit of being fully personalized to an individual or group of people that you intend to reach, but it’s probably not a viable solution if you need larger quantities of personalized videos. If you decide to go down this route, you can either record yourself using your computer, phone, or a camera; or you can utilize the services of one of the third-party tools such as Clipchamp, Clideo, Bandicam, or others.

Use AI Avatars

Another option is to use an AI platform that can make avatars that you can then use to convey your message without the need to make the videos yourself. Some of these platforms include HeyGen, Synthesia, and Scena.ai, but it’s important to keep in mind that while these services can speed up your process and make the creation of personalized videos at scale more efficient, sometimes they can seem a bit creepy or have limited functionality.

Use Personalized Video Software

Using tools that allow a high degree of automation, such as Plainly, can let you have the best of both worlds between personalization and scale. This option is probably best for medium and larger companies and platforms that require personalization, versatility, high degree of customization, and scalability. In the next section, I will explain how you can get started with creating personalized videos with Plainly.

How to Make a Personalized Video Campaign with Plainly

Contrary to how it might seem, creating personalized videos is not that difficult. By using our platform Plainly, you can personalize many elements of a video such as recipients’ names, messages, colors, visuals, and many more in the video creation process.

1. Create a Video Template

The great thing about Plainly is that it’s compatible with After Effects, which means that there are no limits to what you want to do - you can use whatever effects you want and you can use your standard creative workflow. Plainly takes your After Effects project directly, ensuring there is no loss of quality or features. Also, since Plainly relies on After Effects tracking in the background, personalized text, images, or graphics can follow the movement of the objects in the video. This makes the personalization more immersive and increases the “wow” factor of your video. Depending on your budget, you can either do this yourself or you can hire someone to do it for you. Once you have your template ready, you can simply upload it to Plainly.

2. Integrate Your Data

What makes videos personalized is your data. This can be (and often is) a simple spreadsheet, a database, your CRM, or any other structured data format. For a higher degree of personalized video integration, you can use our API feature within your own platform and create advanced automation workflows. Depending on your skills and knowledge, you can do this one of the two ways. You can either do it manually if you have the developer skills for it – or if you don’t, you can still do it by using the no-code options like Zapier or Make to make the integrations for you. Once the integration is set up, Plainly will be able to pull the data to make unique videos tailored to each viewer.

3. Rendering & Delivery

There are two ways this can be done, either natively using batch render, or you can use the API to integrate the feature into your own platform. It is also important to decide which event will trigger the creation and delivery of the video. This largely depends on your marketing strategy or the purpose of the video, it could be a newsletter signup, a certain milestone, a purchase, a set time or interval, or even your customer’s birthday. When your trigger event happens, Plainly will automatically create and deliver the personalized video to the targeted person or group. Choosing this step appropriately is crucial for the timely delivery and relevance of your video.

Plainly can process your videos in bulk as part of its batch render feature, making it very fast. Once that is done, you can download all your videos to pretty much wherever you’d like them to be, whether by messaging (email, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, etc.), straight to YouTube, or directly to your storage or cloud.

If you want to learn more on how to make personalized videos with Plainly, you can check out this video on our YouTube channel or read more about it in this step-by-step guide to personalized video production (examples included).

The Future of Personalized Videos

As technology gets better, personalized videos are going to get better too, and they are likely going to play a key role in enhancing customer engagement and business growth. In the future, we will likely see more and more personalization across all marketing channels and mediums, and it is not unfathomable to envision the future where almost all content is personalized to the viewer – with the new tools at our disposal, it is simply a more efficient way to go about it. With the rapidly evolving AI, we can also expect to see more new and innovative marketing approaches, and that’s why I believe it’s crucial to embrace this trend while it’s still relatively early.

I hope you found this article helpful! Don’t hesitate to book a demo with us and check out our other articles on video personalization.