Picture this:
You and your creative team meet a month before launching a new campaign. On the agenda is conceptualizing a kick-a@$ email campaign that’ll be sent to your entire database. The finalized email is sure to stop even those hardest-to-impress dead in their tracks. Once completed, the emails are sent out, using a run-of-the-mill, basic email platform.
“Wait, you’ve left out some vital stages here,” you may think to yourself, and justifiably so. “What kind of call-to-action did they add? And, most importantly, how is contacts’ engagement with the emails going to be tracked?”
These are all valid questions.
An email campaign will be deemed successful based on measurable metrics. It should achieve (and hopefully exceed) projected email open rates and, more importantly, click through rates.
No one will deny email’s effectiveness as a marketing tool. Yet, even its greatest admirers will admit that there are far more stimulating ways to engage with prospects.
For example, well-crafted videos can engage and delight, but so many of us go about video creation and dissemination in a way that is entirely inconsistent with a well-honed, strategic marketing approach. Too often, we fail to hold video, the content most likely to convert, to the same measurable standards we do email.
Video’s Moment in the Marketing Spotlight
Video has become the weapon of choice for marketers, and with good reason: it’s incredibly effective. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading that same information in text. The average site visitor is 88% more likely to extend his or her visit on a landing page when there’s a video on it.
But video can have a transformative effect on email, as well. Recent research has shown that embedding a video within emails can increase click-through rates by up to 300%. Heck, merely adding the word video to an email’s subject can lead to a 19% spike in open rates and a 25% reduction in unsubscriber rates.
Here’s the question, though: how do we measure the success of video?
Why WE Measure Metrics
Let’s go back to emails, for a moment. Most companies rely on sophisticated marketing automation platforms to carry out email campaigns (think HubSpot, Marketo or Pardot). These platforms can detect exactly how each individual contact interacts with a given email. They will show you how many times each email was opened by any given recipient and highlight his or her interaction with a call to action (i.e. whether they clicked through).
The aggregated metrics, such as overall CTR%, are important, yet a campaign’s performance can truly be analyzed only when individual engagement data is available to us. For example, how did those who received the email cold (without us ever reaching out to them before) react to the email, compared to those who had a certain level of familiarity with us? Did the email resonate more with Americans or with contacts of other nationalities? How about men vs. women?
You need to truly know your audience to measure the impact your marketing initiative has had on it.
Driving Engagement Through Video
When it comes to the way your videos are engaged with, relying on conventional methods and approaches simply won’t cut it. Too often, companies spend all of their time and resources on creating an amazing video but fail to think of the next step: where and how their audience will be viewing it.
Often, savvy, veteran marketers simply dump their video into the internet’s proverbial ether, without stopping to think about tracking viewing patterns, even though the video is a staple of the modern marketing stack. Many companies simply view video purely as a promotional tool; an engaging way to create a buzz surrounding their service or product.
Yet, limiting video to such a narrow role has organizations missing out on its true potential: driving real lead generation results
Start approaching video strategically
For the most part, conventional methods for onsite video presentations will teach you very little regarding audiences’ engagement with your videos. Total views and likes to dislike ratios are nice, but they provide zero insight into the way individual viewers engage with a given video.
Additionally, this data can be misleading. For example, a video may have a million views, but how many viewed it beyond the ten-second mark? For all you know, a majority of your viewership never made it to the sections of the video that matter most.
To gain those insights, you will need to explore more comprehensive video solutions. The latter will show you precisely how each member of your audience interacted with any single video. You’ll know who he or she is, where he or she was when they watched the video, and on which device, and, see when each viewer dropped off.
This information will prove its weight in gold in a few ways:
First, you will be able to truly optimize any given video. Aggregated chart views of individuals’ engagement levels with a video will reveal if and when a video sufferers from major bounce off rates. If you see that there’s a major drop-off in viewership after the first ten seconds, you’ll know you’ve failed to captivate your audience. You might want to explore opening your video differently. Alternatively, if you see a major drop off at the one minute mark, you may want to cut your video off near or at that point.
Second, video can become an integral part of every lead’s journey down your marketing funnel. Modern companies, specifically B2B, rely on elaborate workflows when approaching contacts with marketing collateral. A contact clicking on an email’s call-to-action may be understood as an indication that the contact has shown more serious interest, and can be translated (not always justifiably) as an invitation to be sent additional content. The process is automated and sees contacts receiving specific messages that fit the level of engagement they have exhibited.
All of this can also be applied to video engagement. While integrating with most marketing automation platforms, video platforms let you create workflows with video viewing patterns as deciding factors regarding continued interaction with a lead. If someone lands on your site, clicks play on a video and makes it to the halfway mark, you can see to it that the contact is sent an email offering him or her a demo. If the video is abandoned before the ten-second mark, you can arrange for the contact to be sent an email linking to one of your most enticing blogs. The possibilities are endless.
Start Using Video as Real Collateral
It’s no coincidence that marketing and creative teams spend a lot of time and resources creating awesome videos.
Nothing moves the needle quite like a killer promo or customer testimonial video. However, for it to deliver the ROI you know it can, it’s critical to invest just as much thought into the way you present your video.
Video analytics, made available by comprehensive video solutions, will show you how every individual viewer interacts with your video. Leveraged towards future marketing initiatives, these analytics enable you to tap your videos’ true lead-generating potential.
About the author:
Yoni Yampolsky is a marketing manager at Cincopa, a powerful multimedia management and hosting solution, Cincopa helps businesses tap their videos’ true conversion potential.