What makes a Direct Response Video successful?

When I was a young boy my mother used to take me to the market every Saturday to help her carry the food and groceries for the week ahead. The market was full of colorful characters hawking their wares and all vying for the attention of the shoppers. And certain characters could hold the audience attention better than others, even if they were essentially selling the same products.

Direct response TV has adopted the sales technique from the market trader to the television set, and from here to sending the DRTV advert directly to target customers in the form of video embedded into direct mail cards and letters.

As its name suggests, a Direct Response Video is designed to encourage the viewer to pay attention, engage – and then respond to a call to action. It’s kind of like being in that market again.

That call to action could be to make a donation, or buy a product, or register for an event. The trick is to make it simple - the fewer steps required for the viewer to complete the transaction, the more likely the seller is to make the sale.

So here are 5 key ways to make your direct response video a success.

1 - Deliver your message in a clear and compelling manner and make sure that it’s a good story with a clear objective and call-to-action. 

2 - Engage the viewer with high-quality visuals and audio to give them a first-hand experience of what you are trying to convey.

3 - Use the right presenter, someone with charm and charisma who’s engaged with what they are selling.

4 – Keep your audience engaged throughout the video

5 – And above all, have a clear, concise, compelling - and simple - call-to-action   

The corporate video is dead.

It my all be very well creating a series of corporate videos, but getting anybody to watch them is quite another matter. Approximately 48 hours of video is being uploaded to YouTube every minute, so there’s plenty of competition out there.

The trick with video is to make it relevant, engaging and memorable. I work with a number of technology companies, often with products to sell that are difficult to differentiate form the competition. Do I really want to see two men in suits discuss the relative merits of a particular piece of technology? Does anybody?

Recently this issue came about with a large manufacturer that wanted to show off an environmentally friendly printer. The product manager was armed with a long and verbose presentation followed by a video of a man talking to camera. He was good, but it didn’t work.

Our team came back with a story board – an animated child with pigtails walking into her dad’s office and proceeding to tell all of the staff off, one by one, for the different aspects of office mistakes that were wasteful or environmentally unfriendly, or both. The only thing she approved of was the printer.

The client loved it, because we were able to bring out all the relevant points of the product in a relevant, engaging and memorable way. And only relevant and engaging video works. 

The Power of Video Direct Mail as an opportunity for luxury brands

Continual technological advances and mass production capabilities now allow the commercial application of flat micro LCD screens to be embedded into Print Media. This is enabling corporations to seriously consider incorporating this new innovation into key budget expenditure. Advances in data and customer profiling have also made it easier for brands to better identify their target customers and send their video advertisements directly to those most desired and hardest to reach clients in a manner that both attracts their attention and is highly viral i.e. customers are inclined to show off this innovative technology within their own social groups thus creating an even wider reach from a single piece of direct mail.

Direct mail may be contracting due to the expansion of email marketing, but video in direct mail may buck this trend, particularly for high value goods and services. And in terms of price? A recent successful campaign for Land Rover was carried out by Wonderman using traditional direct mail (i.e. without the use of video) at a cost of $90 per unit shipped to customer. So video cards – at about half the cost - would compete well with this. And don’t forget, even allowing for contraction, the predicted spend in the US alone for 2012 is set at $29.8 billion on traditional Direct Mail

So we are not talking about a small market here.

Among the biggest users of direct mail - Financial Services, FMCG, Automotive, Telecommunications, Retail, Travel and Home Shopping – there are plenty of opportunities for using video to promote high value goods. And with the increase in popularity of social media, luxury brands, which have traditionally viewed above-the-line advertising as a better route to market, are increasing their use of direct mail as a starting point for dialogue with target customers, to encourage further conversations through social media and community sites such as Facebook as well as their own websites.

What is Video Direct Marketing?

Video Direct Marketing (v-dm) is the process of sending flat screen video advertising to prospective customers directly in the post. When the recipient opens the envelope a high-resolution LCD screen embedded within the card plays out a live video advertisement.

This is the latest innovation in advertising, merging above the line TV advertising with below the line direct mail and it represents a paradigm shift in the way companies market their products and services. Where e-dm (electronic direct mail) concerns itself with a “scatter gun” approach - mass marketing with increasingly low customer interest and open rates, v-dm (video direct marketing) uses carefully targeted customer profiling techniques with low volumes - and exceptionally high customer interest.

The shift has come about because of the fragmentation of media and the changes in the way that people consume media that have taken place in the last decade.

Where previously advertisers could probably catch a fair slice of their target audience with a few carefully chosen slots on the TV networks, now there are hundreds of TV channels to choose from, and then of course the internet, which today has quickly overtaken TV in percentage share of people’s media time.

Whilst TV is undoubtedly still the most potent form of media, advertisers are now looking at ways to ensure that the high production costs of TV commercials are maximized and by combining the most powerful form of media (TV advertising) with the most targeted form of marketing (direct mail) advertisers can pick and choose their prospective customers and “take the water to the horse” by sending each individual a video copy of their advert directly in the post. This guarantees the highest response rates to their advertising.

Where companies have related products or services, they are able to make this media very cost effective. For example, a credit card company which has a target audience of 10,000 customers who have all be pre-qualified as eligible for a particular card, sends out a video direct mail to the customers which advertises not only the card itself, but also the types of things that a customer’s might wish to purchase, a holiday, white goods, electronics etc., all of which will earn additional credit card points if purchased using the card. This is just one example of how multiple vendors work together to profile and target customers while sharing the cost of the delivery mechanism

Whilst it is accepted to be a highly potent media, the costs of v-dm are high in comparison to e-dm and therefore it is important to measure the effectiveness of this media in terms of Return on Investment.

Generally speaking, companies who use e-dm find a response rate of 1-2%. That is around 98 out of 100 people not responding to the email.

Companies who carry out customer profiling methodology and use carefully targeting mailings can expect a higher response rate, but response rates rarely rise above 5%. That is around 95 out of 100 people not responding.

By contrast a test mailing carried out by Blackscreen Media Dubai to a random sample base of 100 people produced a response rate of 48% which rose to 76% with follow up calls to those non-responders. Whilst this is only a small sample, Blackscreen Media reports that of its current client base, all have expressed an interest in re-orders, with many companies ordering now in several multiples of their first order. This would seem to indicate the effectiveness of the medium in addition to the existing statistical data.

An interesting further aspect of v-dm, which may outweigh even it’s immediate effectiveness, is that it is also extremely viral – recipients want to show off this new innovation, which in turn spreads awareness of the advertisement to among their social network and beyond.

A UK based company, Vidioh!, reports client observations that many respondents have been as interested in this new technology as the product or service being offered by the advertisers. This is seen as an additional benefit, creating a dialogue between the advertisers and their target audience, which, in a world a digital noise, is seen as vital for any advertiser that wishes to stand out and have their message heard by the prospective customer.

V-dm is also exceptionally “sticky”, as customers can also re-use the video cards and even load additional video content directly from a PC or Mac, they retain the cards, in turn continually advertising the companies branding and own video advertisement.

Vidioh! also reports another interesting aspect of this new form of marketing; it requires very low minimum run rate to make it effective. With a cost per card in the region of $50, companies can send out 200 – 300 cards (and outlay of $10 -$15,000) and expect a response rate of 40% - 60%; which means 80 to 180 new customers.

Prospective customers who respond are also more aware of the product or service being offered, both because video tends to be more easily absorbed than print and because customers tend to watch the advertisement more than once due to the innovative nature of the medium. A trend that has been also recognized from the early stages of product videos online is that customers are less likely to return products having viewed a video demonstration.

Initial interest in the video media cards has been from technology and events companies.

HP, one of the world’s largest technology companies, recently used video cards provided by Blackscreen Media for the worldwide press launch of a new 3D printer in Dubai at the end of February 2012 and has subsequently placed eight new orders for video cards across several divisions of the company.

Xerox Emirates recently used video cards for an event to showcase the company’s new Managed Print Services offering, while The Queen Elizabeth 2 (QE2), the ocean liner now now stationed in Dubai, send out video cards to VIP guests as a keepsake with a video for those attending the New Year’s party on board.

The mail video advertisements come in MP4 or AVI format and the video auto-starts when the card is opened. Manual control buttons can be positioned under the display which allow for the playing of multiple videos.

The high resolution, 16:9 aspect LCD display is powered by a custom board with built-in storage for about 30 minutes of video footage. There's an included speaker, and the Li-ion battery is fully rechargeable via the included USB port.

If required, battery capacity can be increased to up to 7.5 hours and onboard storage boosted up to 4GB – which is enough for 8 hours of video.