The Power of Personalized Video

The annual challenge to create a memorable holiday greeting conveying our appreciation for our customers and prospects was once again upon us.

For creatives, the possibilities are endless. Regardless of theme, the message and sentiment remain the same — a sincere thank you for the year gone by, and best wishes for the pending holidays, and the year to come.

The ultimate aim is to produce something that no one has seen before. Something that captures the attention of your audience in a way they don’t expect, in a way they’ll always remember, and in a way that will make them ask, ‘How’d you do that?’

These goals were core to the conversation the Demand Spring team had with Vidyard, a long-standing business partner and an overall super group of folks, who approached us with an idea. A fantastic idea.

A personalized holiday video.

Next level stuff

Sure, we’re all used to personalized email — by this point, it’s pretty standard stuff. But what Vidyard is doing is truly next level stuff. Personalized video speaks directly to your audience — strategically embedding the recipient’s name, company name, or any custom message you desire in the video itself.

Watch a generic version

You can watch a non-personalized version of Demand Spring’s Holiday Video below. Note that the recipient’s name was populated wherever the placeholder ‘Our Viewer’ appears — this will give you a sense of it, but for the complete experience, keep reading!

How we did it

First we worked with Vidyard to supplement our distribution list with identifiers. Locked and loaded into Marketo, the unique IDs were passed to the Vidyard player, which served a personalized version of our holiday video to the viewer, be they Jim, Alice, Rohit or Bob.

The result?

Demand Spring’s Holiday Email open rate was historically in line with our other email sends at 29 percent — no real surprise there. What caught our eye was a click-to-open rate of 40.3 percent, a number that nearly doubled our highest previous figure.

Even more exciting?

The video garnered more than 160 video views in the span of just a few hours. Recipients were watching the video more than once, and sharing it with their colleagues. Sweet!

The email also prompted a series of emails from recipients. Some told us it was the best holiday email they’ve ever seen. Others peppered us with technical questions and asked if we could help them do something similar. It was exactly the reaction we hoped to receive.