Thank you emails have a positive impact on corporate communication and business relationships of all kinds, and video makes them even more personal.
Personalization might be the number-one video marketing trend of 2021.
It’s growing in importance in every industry. It helps e-learning content creators reach students better. It helps digital video enterprises capture and retain top talent. Today’s environment offers countless opportunities to leverage personalized video content towards developing relationships.
The process of personalizing video content has advanced considerably in the past few years. Simply replacing “Dear Valued Customer” with “Dear $$name$$” isn’t good enough anymore.
Instead, organizations need to personalize their video messages at scale, and in a way that demonstrates authenticity. This is especially important when writing thank you emails, where authenticity is the whole point.
A great thank you email can drive customer loyalty and consolidate a community. Delivering them in video maximizes their impact, and personalization makes them truly shine. Writing a perfect thank you email in 2021 means recording a personalized video.
Examples of Successful Thank You Video Emails
Personalization doesn’t always mean creating one-to-one correspondence with each individual recipient. It means creating video content that speaks to people on a personal level. You can do this by addressing the community your recipients are a part of, and by framing your content around the identity of its recipients.
Here are some ways major brands have achieved exactly that:
1. Johns Hopkins University Thanks Volunteers
Johns Hopkins University sent out this video to all of the donors and volunteers who participated in its 2015 local community service efforts. The video’s acoustic theme song was actually written and recorded by a volunteer who participated, and the message of gratitude from the university president comes off as genuine and emotional.
For anyone active in the Baltimore community, this video sends a striking message. It shows some of the concrete ways that volunteer efforts have improved life for Baltimore residents, and it does so in an authentic, emotional way.
2. Charity: Water Thanks Donors
Charity: Water is an organization that provides access to clean water to disadvantaged communities who need it. For their fifth-year anniversary, they created a video campaign thanking all of the people who helped their cause.
The video begins with a direct and honest introduction from the company CEO. It then segues into a selection of gratitude videos filmed and sent to donors. These videos are funny, heartfelt, and genuine – collecting all of them in a single place drives home the value of the organization’s work in a way that is both personalized and scalable.
Retail supermarket giant Kroger is the largest company of its kind in the United States. With such an enormous surface area to cover, many content creators would assume it’s impossible to create a personalized thank you video that almost half a million employees could truly resonate with.
Kroger accomplishes this feat by focusing on its associates more than its brand. It put CEO Rodney McMullen in the spotlight and had him mention individual employees by name, establishing the values that bring Kroger employees and customers together. At the same time, the video strongly reassures viewers that in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic that had just started, they could rely on Kroger to keep things running.
What the Best Thank You Videos Have in Common
All the examples above share a few key characteristics. Although they show gratitude in different ways, they do it without being overly patronizing or insincere. They strengthen relationships and help incentivize recipients to contribute more towards their relationships.
Emotional impact is one of the main things that these videos have in common. While they deliver important information about how peoples’ contributions help, they do it in as direct a manner as possible. You can do this by showing the beneficiaries directly or just by talking to the camera in a friendly, transparent way
How to Make Successful Thank You Emails Using Videos
When it comes to creating thank you videos, the most important factor to keep in mind is context. Some of the specific strategies that work for certain brands and recipients may be out-of-context if you try to use them exactly the same way. Your videos should align with your brand and display a consistent voice to recipients.
Let’s look at a few specific examples:
Thank You Emails for Corporate Training Completion
For a digital enterprise that requires its employees to undergo periodic training, personalized thank you videos are a great touch. Thanking employees for taking time out of their busy days to complete training can help emphasize the value of the information they are learning.
This is especially useful when the training itself is on a subject that employees tend to underestimate the value of. Compliance, cybersecurity, and ESG content is incredibly important for growing enterprises. Employees, however, don’t always approach these subjects with a great degree of enthusiasm. Showing gratitude for their efforts can help improve training outcomes and ensure better overall training outcomes.
In this case, thank you videos are an opportunity to cultivate a positive company culture and demonstrate brand values from the top-down. Leadership may present the video and thank employees through internal corporate communication for completing their training, or you may have the coach or mentor who conducted that training do the job.
In both cases, the best approach is to personalize the video content as much as possible. In a small corporate training environment, sending personalized one-on-one videos is feasible. In a large environment, personalization can be scaled by addressing employee groups one at a time, using something more grounded than their name and job title.
Thank You Emails for Customer Milestones
Specific price milestones are another popular trigger for creating customer success thank you videos. If your organization has a small group of customers whose lifetime customer value is considerably higher than the rest of your customers, creating personalized videos content that keep these customers loyal makes good business sense.
To do this, you’ll first have to identify a meaningful customer milestone. You can use a statistical concept called the Pareto Principle to do this.
A Pareto distribution refers to any situation where a small number of factors contribute the most to a result. It’s often called the 20/80 principle, but the numbers are not a strict part of the definition.
If your business earns 80% of its revenue from 20% of its customers, then it’s easy to justify spending more resources creating video content that increases the loyalty of those customers. This is one way you could draw the line for a customer milestone.
Then, all you have to do is create personalized video thank you emails for those customers. Since those customers are already paying far more than most customers do, it’s much easier to predict a positive ROI on videos created from this kind of content. You may be able to call in a professional production company to create a high-quality video for these customers, rather than sending a typical selfie-style message with your phone.
Choose a Video Hosting Solution That Enables ROI
If you expect your thank you videos to generate lasting value, you will want to measure their success and use data to calculate their ROI through real-time video analytics. Use a video host like Cincopa to measure viewer engagement and create integration-ready data points you can analyze for key insight. Your gratitude can pay off in an unlimited number of ways. Measuring your content’s success will help you see that happen in real-time.
