Online retailers not only need to stand out from a sea of other e-commerce outlets to win an initial purchase, but to continue to do so again and again. In the third of a three-part series, Mark Blair, VP of EMEA at Brightcove explains how video content can be used by today’s e-tailers to help build and retain loyal brand advocates.
In the first two parts of this series we explored how brands can use video to sustain shoppers’ interest, boost sales, enrich the customer experience and turn browsers into buyers. But once you’ve convinced your viewers to make the first purchase, how do you keep them coming back for more?
Video’s value certainly doesn’t end at the point of purchase – by learning how to automate, personalise and target video content, then analyse the results, you can move beyond simply satisfying customers to fostering true brand loyalty. Here’s how these elements work in practice and why they are so important for e-commerce success:
Building satisfied, loyal customers by staying one-step ahead
One of the surest ways to build brand loyalty is to make customers feel like you know them – because you do! By piecing together a kind of “digital body language” to discern where their interests lie, and paying attention to the preferences they demonstrate when interacting with your brand, you can tailor content to engage customers more successfully. These insights provide an essential understanding of the buyer’s journey, opening up your ability to welcome, remind, reward, retarget, and win them back with automated messaging
Using historical and real-time engagement metrics, for example, you can set up marketing automation logic that will determine the next likely interaction the viewer will have with your brand. You can then direct your customer to this interaction by cueing up your video marketing platform to serve the most contextually relevant content.
Creating a personalised brand experience
Pairing personalisation with video, you can boost current video efforts while markedly increasing the affinity customers feel towards your brand. Using hyper-personalised videos, for example, which insert information – such as a person’s name – into the content, can be a great way of catching your customer’s attention. Similarly, consider adding dynamic CTAs to your video content – these smart CTAs are fed by everything you know about individuals and their interactions with your brand, ensuring you are serving different prompts based on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Aside from personalising the videos themselves, there is also a lot of value in personalising the web content around them. Video-rich websites have a lot to offer customers, but it can be difficult to present all the options that would most appeal to each consumer. With website personalisation, for example, the CMS will react to the visitor’s viewing history and preferences to show the products of most interest – similar to how Amazon’s recommendation engine works. The more videos your customer watches, the more accurate the content and buying suggestions will be, and the better the chance at conversion.
Fostering brand champions
As you continue to take care of your customers with personalised video experiences, you encourage them to become increasingly dedicated and vocal brand advocates.
According to Nielsen, 83% of shoppers place the most trust in the recommendations of friends and family, and 66% of consumers trust the opinions of other consumers online – so if your video marketing efforts leave customers happy enough to talk to others about you, the benefits are clear.
Encourage this kind of behaviour by integrating user-generated video into your social campaigns –giving customers an easy way to share their love of your brand and allowing them to feel part of its story.
With our own research showing that eight in ten (79%) social video viewers agree that video is the easiest way to get to know a brand online, user-generated video can be a powerful advocacy tool, and goes a long way to making your brand more approachable and engaging. It delights other advocates while also stimulating interest from those just beginning the buyer’s journey in the awareness stage.
Top online retailers know e-commerce success is determined by a seamless, frictionless, and enjoyable user experience. Video is now a vital part of any marketer’s strategy and leveraged throughout the buyer’s journey it can reap truly tangible business results.
For e-tailers, it creates an easier and more engaging online shopping experience, engages existing customers and prospects, builds brand loyalty and, ultimately, can create brand advocates who will help you drive sales again and again.
By Mark Blair
VP of EMEA