We’ve recently had a conversation with customer engagement expert Casey Hill from Bonjoro who shared his thoughts with us on customer lifetime value, loyalty, and the power of personalized videos. Read on to find out more!
Shopify recently published a study, which revealed that the top 1% of e-commerce buyers spend 18 times more money than the average. It really shows how impactful those superfans, those advocates of your brand are.
In the e-commerce world, it’s becoming more and more common to talk about customer lifetime value. But the customer LTV is usually only focused on the ‘spend’ part, that is, what is someone going to physically spend? But customer lifetime value has another important aspect: Are they going to refer you?
We live in a world where people read reviews before making a purchase. Advocacy is crucial.
One of the strongest drivers of the buying decision is a referral from someone we know and trust in the industry. So how do we create these fans that go out and spread the word and advocate for us? That’ll leave reviews, tell other people about us, and create that word of mouth motion?
If you are a small to midsize e-commerce brand you need to find that way to differentiate from those massive brands.
But where do you start? First and foremost, you need to build a relationship, starting with some sort of back-and-forth. You need to start a conversation with that individual and create that personal touch in your brand.
One of my favorite ways to do that is through personalized videos.
Videos have exploded in recent years and we know plenty of them in the context of YouTube or Instagram. Videos have been used really actively on a lot of those channels like Instagram for e-commerce brands for a while now, but there’s a new twist that leans more into the relationship side: personalized video.
Imagine that you buy a nice pair of jeans from a store, and then the designer of those jeans sent you a video, saying something like: “Hey, your jeans are on the way!”. You would probably think “Whoa, I didn’t expect this.” It’s surprising, and there’s a good chance it would elicit a response, maybe something like “Thank you, super excited to try these on!”
If you received a video like that, there’s a higher chance you’d tell other people about it.
Part of what we’re looking for here is creating novelty.
Seth Godin talks about a concept in this book Purple Cow. Just imagine that you’re driving down the road and you see a cow? No big deal, you see cows all the time.
But, imagine that you saw a bright purple cow! You’d probably stop to take a photo of it, wouldn’t you? You might text it to your family or friends: “What the heck? I just saw a neon purple cow on the side of the road!”
Novelty helps you stand out in our very, very noisy world. We’re all getting hammered with newsletters and promotions. The question is: how do you stand apart? How do you differentiate yourself? Personalized videos are a great, novel way to create that experience.
Plus, there’s another side of personalized videos: it activates our mirror neurons, which are the neurons that observe and mirror the behavior of others.
How do mirror neurons work exactly? Let’s say you’re at a fantastic concert. You see everyone screaming and excited around you, and that creates excitement for yourself. Studies have shown that at concerts, when the performer interacts with someone in the audience that you’re in close proximity with and see their facial reactions, you get that same level of excitement. It’s not even you, but just seeing that person creates that impact for you.
To translate that to the context of personalized videos: if you show the energy, the facial expression, the tone (all that are unique to the medium of video), it can be truly impactful on your buyers, it leaves an impression and motivate them to share, tell other people about you and also build up that loyalty to want to come back because they feel valued. They’ll appreciate that you took time out of your busy day to send them the video. Personalized videos are highly impactful in 2022 and beyond.