The customer journey has long been a central focus for brands and marketing agencies everywhere. Understanding and guiding that journey is the key to getting conversions and building relationships with customers, and brands use a variety of tools to make that happen. Today, interactive video is at the forefront of how innovative brands can create the perfect customer journey.

Mapping the Customer Journey

The experience that your customers have with your company can be just as important as the products or services you provide. Today, most brands conceptualize the relationship with their customers as a journey, one with a variety of steps that each require a unique approach to navigate successfully.

The individual steps on any customer journey are going to be unique to your business and how it operates. You might be providing a one-off product or an app that users check every day, and you need to understand and define the key interactions throughout the customer journey to capitalize on them properly.

In general, there are five key phases to the customer journey that businesses need to consider.

1. The first is the awareness phase when customers first become aware of your brand through marketing efforts such as video for the customer journey. This is the first interaction, and it’s often the most important, so delivering a lasting impact is essential.
2. Next is the consideration phase, where potential customers consider whether or not to commit. A customized customer journey is highly effective here, helping guide customers to the specific content and information needed to sway their decision in the right way.
3. The purchase phase is when the customer actually makes the purchase, so it’s important to have the right calls-to-action and features to make buying easy.
4. Next, there is the retention phase, where your brand has an opportunity to build a lasting relationship with your customers. A variety of customized customer journey experiences can help keep customers coming back.
5. Finally, there is the advocacy phase, where satisfied customers provide ongoing support for your brand. Crafting the right journey leaves customers more likely to recommend your brand online and to their friends and family.

How Personalized Video Helps Craft the Customer Journey

Today, interactive video and personalization of content are some of the most powerful tools available to craft the customer journey. In any marketing effort, one of the key challenges is ensuring that your content effectively targets the right audience. With video personalization, you can target customers down to the individual to draw in as much engagement as possible.

With Blings’ interactive MP5 videos, you can ensure that the appropriate content is being delivered to customers at the right point throughout the customer journey. Dynamic information can be incorporated into the video in multiple layers, providing a fully personalized experience. Different video scenes and effects can be triggered based on interaction, creating a more engaging experience for customers.

It’s easy to integrate Blings with the most widely used business platforms today, including Shopify, SFDC, HubSpot, Marketo, and more. This lets you augment the customer journey seamlessly, putting interactive video content to work within your established platforms. More engaging formats help drive the customer journey more effectively, and interactive, personalized video is the most engaging format available today.

How to Develop a Successful Personalized Video Campaign

A personalized video is an effective tool for your brand, but how exactly can you develop a successful campaign? Luckily, Blings provides all of the tools and features necessary to build your campaign from the ground up and implement continuous improvement in your efforts.

First, our After Effects extension allows you to implement the highest-quality smart video features with a simple no-code tool. Start from scratch or add elements to existing videos, including personalized text, interactive buttons, animation, images, audio, video, and color. Interactive and personalized elements can connect to dynamic data through a variety of formats.

Making your personalized videos is just one part of crafting the ultimate customer journey. You also need to be able to assess how those videos are performing and continue to improve your methods. Blings provides the data and insight you need to fully understand video performance. You’ll have clear access to watch-time and engagement data alongside robust A/B testing tools.

Analytics provide insight into individual elements of your personalized videos, letting you identify which sections engage customers and which don’t, along with which calls-to-action are the most effective. With Blings, you can make quick changes without the need to re-render the entire video, so you can put these useful insights to work immediately.

Examples of How Businesses Are Using Personalized Video

Creating an interactive video journey for your customers isn’t something that’s coming at some point in the future. It’s something that’s already here today. Brands around the world are already seeing significant increases in sales and engagement through the careful deployment of a truly personalized customer journey.

Fast-food mega chain McDonald’s increased purchase rate through their McCoins loyalty program by 350% using Blings’ MP5 videos. The customized custom MP5 videos provided direct integration with their database to bring the viewer’s status and activity into the video, along with built-in call-to-actions.

Major HMO Clalit Mushlam applied the same principles that go into crafting the customer journey to improve the patient journey at their healthcare facilities. With Blings, Clalit Mushlam reduced their no-show rate with custom videos featuring appointment details, location, and directions for patients.

These and many other companies throughout a wide range of industries are already seeing the impact of the personalization of content firsthand. The versatility of Blings’ MP5 interactive video format lets brands take control of the customer journey in ways that simply weren’t possible before.

The Future of Personalized Video

The future of personalized video is here today with Blings’ MP5 interactive video format and the unique tools surrounding it. With Blings, brands can develop the ultimate interactive videos through our After Effects extension that lets you connect each layer to dynamic data. Blings provides real-time interactivity and integration with major business platforms across the web.

All of this together lets any brand create truly engaging personalized content for its customers. Every step of the customer journey can be managed gracefully with interactive video content developed with Blings.

If you’re a Netflix user like me, you probably enjoy the personalized experience Netflix brings to you. They cater their programs to your taste, offering you new shows that peak your curiosity. They seem to get you. Before long you’re a loyal customer.   

How does that happen? Why do you believe Netflix is in sync with your needs?

The answer is that they've perfected the art of hyper-personalization. To effectively convert your prospects to customers and keep them coming back for more, you need to personalize your marketing and treat your customers individually. But personalized marketing can be tricky. So when you decide to invest in personalized marketing, you better do it right the first time - from setting up technology infrastructure to mapping out the customer’s journey.  

Here are 5 tips for getting your personalized marketing right (the first time). 

Even if you are committed to personalized marketing, and you are eager to start collecting your customer data, you first need to make sure you have the right tools in place. Marketers should strategically map out the mechanics of personalized marketing solutions to make sure their current platform is sufficient to meet different aspects of their marketing needs. 

Here are a few questions you want to ask your marketing team:

• Is the personalization engine capable of handling massive customer data? 
• Do we have the right marketing automation algorithms to automate repetitive tasks?
• Is our product recommendation good enough to drive conversions, especially when we have large product catalogs?
• Do we have the right infrastructure to run multiple A/B tests simultaneously?
• Is our AI-driven content personalization engine smart enough to make intelligent decisions with the individual customer?

From persona to personalization - Every story needs to be backed by data

In today’s digital era, every decision starts with data. Every customer has a unique set of data that can be used to generate customized content, content that will help you connect with the customer dynamically and intelligently. If you have the right technology you should be able to collect your customer’s data at every single touchpoint across his journey.

You need to combine your user’s profile, real-time behavior, browsing history, purchasing history, email opens, geolocation, third-party data, and more to build the unique content that has the most relevance for each customer. This is where machine learning algorithms kick in to do a more granular analysis. The more customer data collected from different times and locations, the more refined and effective personalized content will appear. 

This valuable data can help you generate customer insights and segmentation. It will make it easier to manage your large audiences and help you decide what content to send to whom and when, and where to send it. 

Buyer personas used to be the gold standard of marketing campaigns. You might already have a list of hypothetical characters. But if you want to gain a competitive edge, personas are not enough. You need to go deeper into customer analysis. Instead of targeting a hypothetical bachelor living with his dog in San Jose, California, target your actual customers who are brimming with real data.

Thanks to machine learning algorithms, now you have the capability to drill down many levels more to really understand your specific customers and make decisions at a more individualized level. If you do it right, your prospects will pay more attention to your products and your customers will feel a stronger bond with you. However, you need to keep a close eye on the personalization to make sure it doesn’t go too far. You don’t want your customers to feel their privacy has been infringed upon.   

Impact every stage of the customer journey across channels

While you are offering personalized experiences to your customers, it is important to make sure they affect every stage of the digital customer’s journey. It’s not about selling your products to your customers online anymore. It’s about selling experiences to them. Each of your customers is unique, and each of them has unique wants and needs in different stages of the funnel. 

For example, a clothing eCommerce company might see a customer is browsing jackets. Based on the customer’s profile data and browsing behavior, a dynamic and interactive promotion offer can be displayed that encourages the customer to add to the cart a pair of pants, shoes, or accessories to match that jacket. However, it’s then that Cart Abandonment enters the picture.  The sale is not complete when your customer has all these items in his cart. Research shows that 70% of online shoppers progress to the cart stage but eventually abandon their cart. You need to send personalized emails to those customers to encourage them to finish the purchase. You want to offer highly personalized content in each stage of the customer journey to engage and interact with them, especially in the last part of the journey, the sale. 

After you successfully convert your visitor through the effort of personalized marketing, you need to encourage your customers to keep coming back and continuously delight them so that you can increase their customer lifetime value. 

The personalization game never ends

Just like any other process, you need continuous review and refining of your personalized marketing strategy to ensure its effectiveness. Amass more and more data from your customers, keep iterating and deploying better algorithms by tuning your personalization engine, and keep tracking your customers’ behavior over the long term.

Don’t forget the importance of A/B testing. It helps you to compare different versions of personalized content at different stages of your customer journey so that you can keep optimizing the customer experience to maximize the customer lifetime value. Netflix runs about 250 A/B tests every year - one of the reasons why no two users have the same experience on its platform. 

Final Thoughts

Personalized marketing is not a mystery anymore. With the right technology and some guidance, you too can create a unique and enjoyable experience that meets your customers’ increased expectations. By leveraging AI-driven personalization engine and massive data analytics, you have the chance to forge a long-lasting relationship with your customers.

So ask yourself: Isn’t it time I began implementing personalized marketing for my company?

Still have questions? We are here to help and provide suggestions on personalized marketing. 

yosef@blings.io

Businesses often face the challenge of getting new customers and retaining the existing ones. But this could be made much easier if we understand the power that personalized video content has, and how we can use various types of videos to improve our marketing strategy. 

What is a personalized marketing video? 

Imagine a world where each of your customers, whether potential or existing, will be targeted to a special video made just for them. Well, now you don’t even need to imagine! Nowadays, this is one of the most effective ways to create engagement with your audience.

By making personalized content, you can address your customers by their names and create dynamic videos that will make them feel like it was made for them especially! This kind of marketing strategy can help you create and strengthen the connection with your audience and address them directly rather than them just stumbling around your content over the internet. 

The benefit of using a platform that allows you to make a personalized interactive video, like Blings, is it gives the option to make your videos unique and dynamic, and address your customers in various shapes of personalization in your videos, such as their areas of interest or a specific problem they have, that your business can solve.

All of that can improve the user experience each customer gets, and increase the amount of engagement that you get from your audience. 

And why is engagement so important? 

Great question! It’s important to stress the fact that the internet is an active arena with lots of distractions at any given time. So if you’ve managed to get your potential client to stop scrolling and pay attention to what you have to say- you are probably doing something right.

Engagement is all about those interactions you have with your audience, and this is what can help you build a personal connection with them, that eventually will lead you to a strong and loyal community. So if that is what we all desire, the smartest thing to be done is to make sure that the connection we build with each of our customers is valid and sustainable, and personalized video marketing is one of the best ways to do it.

You could identify who your client is and how you could provide him your service in the best way for both of you, so he will get personalized content that will be targeted on providing his needs, while you get your goal- a loyal and engaging customer. 

So how exactly can a personalized video strategy improve engagement?

It’s not a secret that in the past few years words have become less and less effective when trying to deliver a message. Even on social media we can see that posts that are not containing any visual aids will not get as much traffic as a video will get.  

The thing about dynamic videos is it speaks to each person individually and they will have to stop what they are doing to interact with the video, because of that exact feeling of “somebody is speaking with me right now”, and this is what makes them feel that said connection with you.

They will get, even Subconsciously without realizing it themselves, the feeling that you understand their issues and you could help them by providing your specific service, so by integrating a personalized video marketing strategy you could have some kind of a personal conversation with your customers without having to actually speak with every each and one of them, but still make them go through a captivating and consolidating experience with your brand, which is what exactly will lead to the magic result of engagement. 

In which ways can we use personalized videos?

That’s the real beauty of it- you can use it for any occasion or reason you would like!
Dynamic and interactive video marketing could help you get various goals that are an outcome of your new engagement strategy, such as gaining new clients, sales drive, and enhancing your community, so you can use personalized video to each of your goals. For example:

• Introduction videos. Those will introduce you to the potential clients that still have not made an acquaintance with you. This will explain who you are and why your service is the best fit for them specifically.
• Explainer videos. In which you could show any innovations that you may have in your business and help your audience to learn about your products even more, in an interactive and engaging way. 
• ‘Thank you’ videos. A special way to interact with your paying customers by thanking them for their loyalty and trust, will increase the emotional connection to a whole new level, making them feel appreciated and valued. 

How to choose the platform that will help me make interactive videos? 

In the current marketing climate, there are a lot of platforms that discovered the value behind using personalized videos and are offering various ideas and packages for your business. It is important to conduct research before choosing the platform so you could enjoy the benefits of personalized interactive videos that are the most suitable for you.

In Blings we offer a platform that gives you the ability to modify your content, design, and campaign data, with real time personal control, with an option to run A/B testing and get detailed analytics will ensure that your campaign meets all your goals.

We have unique technology that allows you to implement various interactive tools and options directly into your videos, that will give you a better and deeper understanding of what your customers really need and how you could help them with that while ensuring longer viewing times and motivating your audience to further interact with your product through call-to-action buttons. All of that without extra cost for scale, frequency or distribution! So you could have unlimited opportunities for you to show your customers their videos anytime. 

If it sounds great to you (well, because it is!), you can call Blings to hear more about what we can offer to make your video marketing strategy the best it can be! 

Consumers today have high expectations for the companies they do business with. They don’t just want a product or service. They want a customer journey. It’s a real challenge for businesses to craft that journey, with so many details to plan and execute. Among the most effective strategies to do so is to focus on customer personalization to build a more meaningful experience.

What Is a Customer Journey?

Understanding what a customer journey is the first step to building one for your customers. Everyone understands that there are certain things you need to know about your customers, who they are, what they’re looking for, and how you can give it to them. However, the customer journey represents a comprehensive look at what’s really happening when customers interact with your business.

Not all businesses have the same customer journey. You can look at a traditional retail store and plot out the journey fairly simply as needing to buy something, evaluating options, going to the store, making the purchase, and using the product.

However, customer experience mapping is far from that simple for most online businesses. Instead, these businesses need to identify how customers are finding them, how they interact with their websites, the impact of follow-up marketing, how reviews factor into the equation, and more.

How Can I Handle Customer Experience Mapping?

Because every business is unique, there isn’t a sure-fire way to put together a customer experience map. You could have certain factors at play those other businesses wouldn’t ever have to worry about. In many cases, developing a better understanding of the consumer decision journey is best handled by relying on data.

Ideally, you should have access to a wide range of analytics for your store, website, marketing, and more. With this data, you can begin to shape a model of how your customers interact with you throughout the customer journey. What are your click-thru rates for ad campaigns? Are you dealing with abandoned carts? How do customers respond to follow-up emails?

By asking yourself the right questions, you’ll be able to develop a more accurate model of how customers are really using your business. From there, you can address stress points and make improvements as needed.

What Is Digital Customer Experience?

A digital customer is one who is interacting with your business strictly or primarily online. This isn’t the same experience as somebody has physically going to a store, so it can’t be handled the same way by your business. Instead, you need to be implementing specific digital strategies in order to evaluate what is digital customer experience and how you can improve it.

There are more tools than ever available today to improve the digital customer experience. For one thing, the consumer decision journey now extends far from your website. Businesses have a range of social media and paid marketing campaigns that are also critical to the digital customer experience and often the first point of contact. Making these elements dynamic and meaningful can really improve how a customer sees your business.

How Do Personalization and Customer Experience Go Together?

Many of the tools available today for improving customer experience focus on customer personalization. Businesses are able to make a truly personal connection with their customers, which in turn helps promote sales and encourage repeat business.

There are many different ways that businesses can implement personalization and customer experience to achieve the best results. One of the simplest examples is the use of a customer’s name in your correspondence. That’s a basic feature of most email and other communication management platforms, but even that makes a difference.

Today, there are many more opportunities for advanced personalization. With the right data, you can provide a highly tailored customer experience that can identify what your customers are looking for and make it easier for them to find it. In doing so, you provide a faster and more straightforward customer journey.

How Can I Make Customer Experience More Dynamic?

When it comes to the customer experience, businesses need to understand what types of content are most likely to lead to a sale. For almost any customer base, that means video. Customers who would lose interest in reading through product descriptions or other content are more likely to hang around for a video that delivers that information instead.

Whether for your website, social media, or other marketing, videos simply perform better than text and images. Video content also provides businesses with another opportunity to really establish their brand and build a more meaningful connection with their customers. Your videos can implement your unique voice, style, and tone to distinguish your brand in the eyes of your customers.

Can Video Content Be Personalized?

There are plenty of personalized customer experience examples out there, but chances are the only ones that come to mind are text-based, like putting someone’s name into an email header template. It’s not like you can film unique videos for every single customer, but there are still ways to implement personalization into video content.

A video can be personalized with a wide range of elements, much like any other type of content. Customer names, locations, or even targeted content can be implemented. Of course, pulling this type of ambitious campaign off would be a real challenge for just about anyone. However, you can implement your own video personalized customer experience examples with the right tools.

How Can I Deliver a Personalized Customer Experience With Blings?

Blings is a personalized video solution that makes it possible for businesses to integrate true personalization into video content. The platform is highly effective and can easily scale to meet the needs of any business.

The data-driven platform lets you make campaigns that feature real-time video personalization, including a wide range of interactive features to further enhance customer engagement. Blings also provides businesses with comprehensive analytics so that they can better craft the customer journey.

Does your business need something new, a better way to reach your customers? You can get started with Blings today and find out how far innovative video content can take your business.

Personalization is an amazing tool for developing a better customer experience and reaching out through engaging marketing. Businesses around the world are implementing personalization in exciting new ways, and the versatile personalized video platform that Blings provides is a prime example of this kind of marketing. Here are some of the ways that your business can take personalization to the next level.

The Rise of Personalized Video

Personalization has existed in online marketing in some form for decades. Even very rudimentary systems have been able to incorporate a potential customer’s name into their text, as can be seen in the widespread use of email marketing management tools. However, this can only do so much for engagement.

A better way is to implement personalization in videos. Traditionally, this would have been an incredibly difficult task, with personalized video messages being unfeasible for most industries. However, Blings makes generating scalable personalized videos possible for anyone. Now you can take full advantage of the improved engagement and impact that video marketing has while also delivering customized content.

Making Better Use of Location

Location data is another prime target for personalization strategy. This has already been in use for some time by simply shoe-horning the name of a user’s town into text. However, this is barely scratching the surface of what can be achieved with modern personalization technology. Now, you can incorporate meaningful information based on a user’s location into your personalized video message.

Regional data can be taken from a wide range of sources to improve the customer experience. This can be as simple as incorporating information about the local weather or providing the correct local time in your content. The best thing about these strategies is that they can be fully automated with the right solution, making the approach scalable for any type of business. 

Including a Personal Touch

One of the key goals of personalization is to develop a more one-on-one customer experience. You want your customers to feel like they have a personal connection with your business that can lead to a more fulfilling and longer-lasting relationship. That means you’ll be able to bring in more customers and keep them more effectively.

Incorporating a person’s name into content is one of the basics of personalization, but it’s still very effective. You shouldn’t overlook the impact that it can have when a customer feels that they are being addressed personally. In some cases, implementing a profile picture from a connected social media account can further improve this personal touch.

Interactivity and Personalization

Developing a truly engaging customer experience is the primary reasoning behind personalization. Adding interactivity to a personalized video can take that a step further. Interactive tools can create a guided journey through personalized content. This adds another dimension to the process that lets you address even more of your customer’s needs.

Interactivity also introduces opportunities for you to better understand your customers. The information you can gather based on how your customers interact can serve as a useful tool for improving your process in the future and developing better strategies.

Delivering Targeted Content

Marketing today is largely based on accurately targeting the right consumers with the right businesses. Incorporating these kinds of suggestions into content can provide a more fulfilling experience for your customers. By providing them with relevant and actionable recommendations, you’re delivering real value that customers will notice.

This is particularly effective when paired with location data. Providing suggestions for businesses and establishments in the area that can help meet customer needs can be highly effective. You can make customers more likely to stay with you by making their lives easier through the personalization you implement.

Continuously Testing Your Strategies

Making use of personalized video B2B or B2C applications can really benefit from involves developing the right strategies. A major part of that development is being able to test different versions of personalization and evaluate how well customers are responding. This testing plays a vital role in the continuous development of your personalization strategy.

Blings makes this task incredibly straightforward with integrated A/B testing for your personalized video messages. With each change you make, you can gauge the difference in how well your customers respond. This way, your customized efforts continue to improve over time, giving you a better strategy in the long run.

Maintaining Scalability

Scalability is among the greatest efforts in personalization. Generic content is easy to scale. There are no limits to how much you can simply copy a video and spread it to customers. With personalized content, you need to find an effective solution that lets you generate unique video messages at a scale that works for your business.

Blings provides a personalization solution that is infinitely scalable. You can generate personalized video messages as needed without any limit. No matter what your unique needs are, Blings is the personalization solution that can help you improve customer engagement.

Capitalizing on Analytics

You need to understand how well your strategies are working for your business is going to succeed. Doing so requires the right analytics that really captures the customer experience and lets you know where improvements need to be made. With an in-depth look at the impact of your content, you can make better use of personalization to continue growing your business.

Blings can give you the analytical tools you need to better collect and understand consumer data from your personalized content. You’ll be able to continuously improve your efforts and develop a better picture of the customer journey, leaving you more capable of addressing their unique needs.

Getting Started With Blings

Blings is a platform that lets you truly embrace personalization through the use of innovative personalized video messages. With numerous opportunities for different types of personalization, your content will be more engaging and more likely to satisfy your customers’ needs.

You can contact Blings today to find out more about what our platform can do for your business. We’re always happy to answer any questions you have about how personalization can help you.