User-generated content v curated campaigns for personalized email campaigns.

Creating personalized images and videos for email campaigns is becoming a crowded marketing place. There are a handful of players who are tackling the opportunity in slightly different ways. The products are broadly similar, with some companies focusing more on realism and others on easy-of-use.

You won't need to spend much time on google to find a statistic about how much more effective video marketing is when compared to still images and that personalization marketing is going to be essential in the coming years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1133006/new-b2b-marketing-tactics-channels-usage-plans/

Both 'personalization (41%)' and 'videos (39%)' rank #2 and #3 on the list of new marketing tactics to be employed in 2022.

Therefore combining both video and personalization as a marketing service would seem to be an obvious win-win. There are two main approaches to generating this content. Customer-lead generation or if the technology can be slipped into a standard creative process developing marketing campaigns.

Let's look at a couple examples and how they offer a personalized video marketing product.

Personalized videos - User-generated content

Moovly has created a lightweight desktop video editor within a browser window. Using an interface similar to the Adobe products, there is a timeline, access to libraries and various timing and visual effects to deliver vast numbers of creative parameters at your fingertips. There will be a limitation when compared to professional video creating and editing tools. Still, they are presuming that a core number of features will keep many of the DIYers happy.

The visual quality of the outputs depends on the creative 'skills' of the operators and the assets that they are using in the video. It'll come as no surprise that professional video editors and producers are better than your average DIYer at making videos. It is for this reason that Moovly is a tool that is unlikely to be used for large brands, more suited to smaller companies where a DIY mentality is part of everyday work life. The other point of difference is the level of integration of personalization. These videos are, of course, personalized, but in a reasonably rudimentary text overlay sort of way. https://www.vyond.com/, https://biteable.com/ and https://simplified.com/ play in the same area, targeting the same customers.

Personalized videos - Curated + visually integrated

Get over the uncertainty of how to pronounce Idomoo and look deeper into the software. You'll see they are making a compelling product which can pull in various streams of personalized data and present it in a slick marketing video.

These videos are not created from within a DIY browser window. They are typically made using the normal channels of professional video creation in-house or supported by an external agency. The clever tech behind Idomoo will then personalized a few critical parts of the video and fully integrate these parts back into the professionally shot and edited video The last step is to bulk process these videos, one for every intended audience member, before being sent off to their intended recipient.

This creative process must be aligned with any large brand's creative department, marketing team and brand guidelines. Whilst being a more involved process, the end results will be more professional and the personalized element more seamlessly integrated into the video - creating a superior campaign.

But, let's stop for a moment.

Videos are excellent and engaging but can be fairly time-consuming to create, whether via the user-generated or curated campaign approach. Still images have a raft of benefits that perhaps shouldn't be forgotten.

• Blink of an eye communication.
• Lightweight and load straight into email.
• No storyboard or voice-over to create.
• Personalization of still images is easier than video.
• Cheaper to produce an image compared to a video.

If a personalized image is well designed, curated and visually integrated into a comprehensive advertising campaign, it can be more efficient at delivering a marketing message than even a video.

We are not talking about a stock library background image with floating text here, but a single image which summarizes a brand and integrates a personalized message, with an explicit call-out and story-starting engagement. A fully curated and personalized marketing image.

Maybe not everything should be a video just yet.

Alex Hammond

Founder of imagefactory.io

Currated and crafted photo-real personalized marketing images