Website Members Weren’t Viewing Videos
Challenge
Project Type: Strategy, custom plugin and integration
Technology and Integrations: Brightcove, Acy newsletter management, Google Analytics
An educational membership organization was producing video content its members were not watching. The content team kept shipping and the pile of unwatched videos kept growing.
The cause was not quality or interest. Members simply did not know the videos existed. Nothing in the organization’s regular communication told them.
There was a second problem sitting underneath the first. Newsletters and videos were produced by a number of different contractors working on different schedules. Even if someone decided today that videos should go in the newsletter, no one owned the handoff between “a video is finished” and “members hear about it,” and any solution that depended on people remembering was going to fail on a schedule nobody controlled.
They came to us with three things to fix. Get new videos in front of members. Make that happen reliably, without depending on contractors coordinating with each other. And work down the backlog that had already accumulated.
What We Did
We started in their Google Analytics and found that most members reached the site through links in the daily and weekly newsletters. The channel that could carry video was already running.
The obvious next step was to scope and pitch a project. We did not. We proposed a test that cost two newsletters instead: we added linked images of recent videos to two upcoming sends, using the speakers’ profile photos as the images, since people respond more to pictures of people than to thumbnails of slides. Then we compared the click-through rates against the client’s historical averages.
The reason to spend two weeks proving it was simple. If newsletter placement did not move clicks, then building a plugin to automate that placement would have automated something that does not work, at considerably greater expense. One of the two newsletters improved its click-through rate by 30%. The other improved by 50%.
With the mechanism proven, we built the thing that made it repeatable. The custom plugin connects their Brightcove video library to Acy, their newsletter management software. Whoever is assembling a newsletter picks videos from the available pool, assigns them to a scheduled send, and the plugin inserts them formatted correctly for the email.
The plugin also alerts administrators when a newsletter is scheduled to go out with no videos assigned to it. That alert is the part that solves the contractor problem. The failure mode was never someone doing the job wrong, it was the job quietly not happening, and an alert is what turns a silent omission into something a person sees.
Result
Within 30 days of launch, video views were up 15%, email forwards had doubled and sometimes tripled as members passed videos into their own networks, and read-through rates improved across the newsletter program.
Within 90 days, newsletter click-through rates had doubled and 450 videos had been put in front of readers. The backlog of unwatched video started dropping rather than growing.
The client described the project as “one of their most successful projects of the year.”
2X Clickthru rate within 90 days
15% more video views in the first 30 days
450 videos introduced in 90 days
Let’s Talk About Your Project
Have a complex technical challenge that needs expert developers? These are the sort of problems that are our bread and butter. Get in touch.
