In Colin Shaw’s latest (insightful) post he provided a link to the following video:
If you watch the video you will see a profound change in behaviour by simply turning the mundane, take for granted, into an interactive / engaging experience. What if I had used text to describe the events in the video? Ask yourself would it have had the same impact? Would your experience been the same? Would your level of engagement been the same? Would your level of comprehension been the same? I know that for most people the video increases comprehension, engagement and delight. That is certainly true for me; we forget that text is a relatively recent invention and reading/comprehension is a specialised skill that has to be learnt over a long time.
That got me wondering about marketing, communication, personalisation, engagement and the customer experience. Is it possible for a commercial organisation to communicate information in a way that improves the customer experience and increases marketing effectiveness? Put differently, is there a way for us to make our communication stand out and better engage our customers? I think there is: personalised video. I can think of two particular instances where it is likely to be particularly useful. First, communicating the complex and second marketing offers.
Communicating the complex through personalised video
Imagine that you are customer of a mobile telco and instead of getting the same old text based monthly bill, that you struggle to understand and mostly ignore you, you get the following video addressed to you personally:
What you be surprised even delighted? Would you sit up and pay attention? Do you think you are more likely to respond to the marketing offer embedded in this monthly bill? I know that for me it is yes, yes and yes. Talking about that I do wish that Sky would do something like this because each month I receive a bill and each month I struggle to make sense of it. What is the likelihood that if the bill was explained in this way that there would be drop in the number of calls into the call centre asking questions about the bill? How much could be saved by cutting out calls that the customer does not want to make and the business does not want to handle?
Do you have a pension policy? Do you understand the yearly statements that you get? I struggle to make sense of my statements even though I am financially literate (I am a Chartered Accountant and a member of the ICAEW) and sometimes I simply file them away meaning to look at them yet somehow don’t get around to it. What if you received this yearly statement as a personalised video:
Making marketing offers come to life through personalised video
How about bringing your marketing offers to life? Forgoing the text based direct mail that lands in the post box and is probably binned and replacing it with a personalised video to your email address? Take a look at the following two videos and see what impact they make on you and might make on your customers:
Who is making personalised video a reality?
When I first came across this idea I jumped to the conclusion that it must be expensive. Turns out that is not the case. There is company in Israel called Idomoo that excels at personalised video and can do it for a relatively small sum of money. If you want to learn more about the mechanics and financials around personalised video then I suggest you contact Danny Kalish the CTO and Co-Founder.
Discloure: I have no personal or financial connection with Danny Kalish or Idomoo. One of the readers of this blog contacted me to make me aware of personalised video and then put me in touch with Idomoo so that I could learn what is possible and what Idomoo are doing. I am happy to write about this because I can see the value in personalised video.
