Carolina Alliance Bank (CAB) was established in 2006 as a full service commercial bank to serve the Spartanburg, SC community. Carolina Alliance Bank's primary emphasis is on consumer private/professional and small to mid-sized business banking. "Our goal has always been to provide the best customer service and bring together the top banking professionals in this market," according to Carolina Alliance President and CEO John Poole.

Marketing Objective

As a newly established financial institution, Carolina Alliance Bank was looking for an affordable yet impactful way to introduce the newly founded institution to businesses and residents in the Spartanburg, SC metropolitan region. According to CEO John Poole, "We wanted to be able to personalize our story and our vision for the bank for customers and prospects using web video in a way that encouraged people to forward the message to others, share their feedback with us and visit our newly created Carolina Alliance Bank website."

The FLIMP Campaign:

The Bank hired a local marketing agency, CapitalIdeas to produce a series of video interviews with CAB employees to introduce the bank to potential customers, and to enable management to communicate their vision for bank to viewers in a compelling and personal way. CapitalIdeas decided to use FLIMP to create, distribute and track a web video marketing campaign for the Bank. Two flimp videosites video brochures were created using the bank's video content and branding. They were then delivered by email several weeks apart to CAB's opt-in mail list as well as an email list rented from the local Chamber of Commerce. Videosite Viewer interactions, engagement and responses as well as viral forwarding was tracked by email address within the Flimp Account reporting dashboard. After completion of the campaign, one of the flimp videosites brochures was embedded into the homepage of the CAB website using. The video and content for the campaign was hosted and delivered using the FLIMP Rich Media Platform and email marketing tools.

Summary Campaign Results

Total videosite viewing time for both campaign deployments was 42 hours 30 minutes. All viewer engagement, response and viral data was tracked and reported by individual email address in the FLIMP reporting dashboard. In total, 4,173 flimp video emails were sent in two deployments four weeks apart. Of the total emails delivered, 3,447 emails were opened for an email open rate of 82.6%. A total of 2,409 viewers clicked open and watched the flimp videosite message, representing 69.8% of total email opens. The video messages averaged 2 minutes 28 seconds each. Of the total viewers, 726, or 30.2% watched a video message to completion and the average video viewing time was 1 minute 12 seconds across all viewers. A total of 252 viewers, or 10.5% of viewers clicked one of the videosite response links and 99 people or 4.0% of videosite viewers forwarded the message to a friend.

Carolina Alliance Bank FLIMP Videosite Email Campaign. Viewer Engagement and Response Data

Target Audience Actions	# of Viewers	Viewer Response Rate
Received video email campaign	4,173	100% of delivered emails
Opened email with flimp videosite message	3,447	82.60% of email recipients
Total videosite views (includes views from viral recipients)1	2,409	69.89% of email opens
Watched to completion (watched entire video)	726	30.14% of videosite viewers
Response links clicked (videosite response)	252	10.46% of videosite viewers
Forward to a friend (sent to a friend)2	99	4.00% of videosite viewers

1. Multiple views by the same person within 5 minutes are counted as one videosite view.
2. Viral Recipients data does not include messages forwarded directly from email agent (such as Gmail, Outlook, etc.).

Two separate flash videosite email marketing campaigns were created, launched, and tracked by viewer email address using FLIMP without any programming or analytics plug-ins. The campaigns targeted business and community leaders in Spartanburg, SC.

In response to the tremendous increase in online video consumption and sharing by consumers, Best Buy Corporate Marketing working with its direct marketing agency, initiated a series of targeted video email campaigns using the Flimp eVideo Marketing Platform. The video email campaigns were included as an experimental pilot component of an integrated direct marketing program designed to increase Best Buy brand awareness and acquire new customers among growing African American, Hispanic and Korean demographic populations.

Marketing Objective

Recent Forrester research has shown that the use of video with email messaging produces 2-3 times higher click through rates (CTR) than using static web content. The primary purpose of the Best Buy eVideo marketing campaigns was to test these findings and to further assess the potential marketing benefits of combining rich media and video with traditional email marketing messaging. More specifically, the purpose of the eVideo marketing campaigns was to evaluate the potential and performance of the Flimp eVideo marketing platform when used for consumer email marketing promotions. Best Buy was interested in learning how the use of video based email messaging would influence target audience engagement, response rates and sharing behavior once a video email message was opened and whether the behavior would vary depending on the type of promotion and the target demographic audience.

Note: The Flimp eVideo Marketing Platform utilizes interactive video thumbnail links to connect viewers to video landing pages, there is no impact on email delivery rates or email opens. Therefore, email delivery was not evaluated as part of this marketing experiment. “We wanted to understand how the use of audiovisual content with direct calls to action would influence viewer behavior and response rates– and to try an innovative new marketing method to complement our offline messaging,” said Hershel Herndon, VP of Best Buy.

The Best Buy eVideo Campaigns

A series of promotional video email campaigns were developed for the Holiday Season and the Super Bowl with diverse messaging and branding targeting African American, Hispanic and Korean ethnic populations. The eVideo promotions included a limited time offer 10% discount coupon for the purchase of an MP3 player or headphones for the Holiday campaign and a flat screen TV for the “Big Game” campaign. The landing pages were designed to reflect the cultural diversity of each target audience. For the Hispanic target audience messaging was developed in Spanish as well as English. See Figure 1 above to view examples of the eVideo landing pages used for the marketing campaign. Target audience marketing lists were developed by a third party providers and emails were appended for the email campaigns. The email delivery was conducted by a third party email provider. The Flimp eVideo marketing platform was integrated with the email delivery platform in order to track and report detailed viewer engagement and response activity on the video landing pages. The integration was pre-tested to ensure accurate collection of viewer engagement, response and sharing data by the Flimp platform.

Best Buy Campaign Results:

Between December 15, 2009 and February 3, 2010 two separate eVideo Marketing campaigns were carried out respectively for the Holiday Season and the “Big Game”. For each of the campaigns, four variations of the creative design and video were developed for each respective target audience; African American, Hispanic (English), Hispanic (Spanish) and Korean. The eVideo marketing campaign results were then organized as follows;

• Aggregate viewer results for both campaigns across all target audiences
• Aggregate viewer results for the Holiday and Superbowl campaigns
• Aggregate results by target ethnic audience across both campaigns For opened emails, the results showed that the Flimp video landing pages drove exceptionally high rates of email click thru’s, viewer engagement, response rates and sharing activity including;
• Average email click thru rate of 32%. Compares to industry email CTR average of 4.5%
• Average of 3.2 video views per email click thru indicating high number of repeat and shared views
• Average video play rate of 97%. Only 3% of viewers could not play video
• Watch to completion rate of 45%. Represents high brand engagement
• Average response rate of 56%. Represents total response link clicks divided by the total number of views
• Average viewing time of 1.9 minutes. Compares to 8 seconds for average HTML email message