Using Video Campaigns for Customer Retention and Upsell

Brightcove’s customer base includes thousands of companies and thousands of contacts within those companies. 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, 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 or 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 ranked 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 we 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. Shot 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 thumbnail 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.

Customer Marketing Video Campaign Results

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. 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 to make 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.