Using Video Campaigns for Customer Retention and Upsell

In my previous post, Video Stories + Integrated Marketing Campaigns: Leading and Supporting Roles, I discussed how video can play both a lead and supporting role in marketing campaigns. This post dives deeper into how my team here at Brightcove uses video for customer marketing initiatives with great results. Our first retention campaign quickly revealed multiple expansion opportunities. Here, we share these results.

Brightcove’s customer base includes thousands of companies and thousands of contacts within those companies. Our customers range from Fortune 500 firms like EMC, Johnson & Johnson, and IBM to mid-market, fast-growth companies like Legal Zoom and Bazaarvoice. We’re also proud to have many non-profit and faith-based organizations as customers. Our challenge, like many companies, was this: how can we humanize our interactions with customers to connect and get a response? Regular html or plain text email is impersonal while periodic check-in phone calls rarely connect, or are hard to scale. Luckily, here at Brightcove we approach our challenges with a video-first mentality.

Why Video Works for Customer Retention

As companies try to improve customer loyalty and retention, a very basic element is often overlooked-- the human element. In a day and age when predictive marketing and marketing automation are all the rage, it’s important to remember we are marketing to people, not Eloqua IDs, nor Salesforce contact records with high lead scores. Let’s build relationships.

Brightcove maintains high retention rates and we want to protect this relationship while potentially growing opportunities for expansion within an account. This is why our account managers (AMs) are so important. It became clear they would be the stars of our first video communications to our customers.

Why Customer Marketing?

In 2016, 32% of C-level executives rank retaining an existing customer base as a strategic priority, second only to initiatives focused on growing their customer base (42%). With account-based marketing (ABM) and customer marketing, we try to conquer both. Maybe one division of a $5B company is using Brightcove for marketing purposes, but the HR team or training group has an internal communications or live streaming use case that Brightcove can also address. Customer marketing helps expose those opportunities for additional use cases.

How We Created Our Customer Video Campaign

Here is our strategy, step by step.

1. Shoot individual videos of our account managers introducing themselves and explaining their role at Brightcove and why they enjoy it. The videos came across as authentic and unrehearsed. This builds a personal connection. Our videos expressed personality, energy, and a unique voice.

2. Crafted very short text emails, 5-7 sentences, with a thumb shot of the AM’s video. The emails were sent as if coming from the AM themselves and were personalized accordingly.

3. Led the recipient (upon email click-through) to a landing page containing the introduction video. The page also contained some fun facts about the account manager, like first concert, spirit animal, and favorite Brightcove video.

4. Recorded data through our Eloqua integration which enables us to capture who watched the video for how long and how many times.

5. Set Salesforce alerts to “close the loop” on video. Account Managers could see which contact watched which video for how long and follow-up appropriately.

The Stunning Results of a Customer Video Marketing Campaign

Customer Marketing Campaign Summary

Even the qualitative feedback was encouraging. Responses ranged from the friendly (“so good to see and hear who you are”) to the more business driven and immediately actionable (“let’s set up a meeting”). Currently, dozens of meetings have been arranged. The best part is that many of the responses and meetings are with new contacts in the account, achieving our goal of visibility within additional business units of a customer account.

These videos brought new people into conversations with Brightcove. In addition to our main contact, we now are engaged with the marketing automation team, the internal communication team, the training team, etc. We led with a human element, utilizing video for engagement. Do I think these same results would have been achieved with a plain text email? No way! Video brought our collaborative culture to life, and presented our AMs as knowledgeable, helpful people here to make customer video initiatives successful.

Key Content Takeaways

Humanize your content: you can automate a message, but use people to deliver it.

Consider length: keep your videos short, one-minute maximum.

Edit for brevity: to ensure click-throughs, don’t drown the video thumbnail in text.

Build relationships: use this kind of video for personal connections not hawk a product; as this campaign demonstrated, the sales opportunities will follow.

Getting started with video for customer marketing is easier than it looks. Define your objective, hone the message, record one video and test it. What are you waiting for?