Over the past several years, we’ve witnessed the transformative effect that interactive video has had throughout the e-commerce customer lifecycle. While online shopping has been around for decades, the shopper’s desire to have a holistic, personalized journey that encapsulates the entire experience has continued to grow.
Today’s digital landscape provides opportunities for merchants to stand out by reorienting their e-commerce strategies toward a more interactive customer-centric approach. A crucial part of this approach is leveraging various interactive elements in video to offer immersive experiences that engage customers throughout their lifecycle. And this goes far beyond simply adding a “buy now” button to e-commerce videos.
To truly maximize the opportunities interactive video elements hold, we need to understand the modern e-commerce customer lifecycle and—most importantly—how it’s changed.
What Is the Customer Lifecycle?
The customer lifecycle is the journey a person takes to discover, research, buy, and use a product and transform into a brand advocate.
In the past, e-commerce customers would typically take a predictable, linear path to purchase, starting with discovering the product, becoming interested in it, researching pros and cons, and then purchasing the product. Once purchased, the journey would continue with post-purchase activities like using the product and potentially reviewing it and becoming a brand advocate.
But with more sources of information available to consumers, like video, social, and, most recently, AI-driven search engines, we’ve seen a shift to a nonlinear journey that is permanently replacing the traditional linear path.
It’s now much more common for today’s customers to criss-cross through various stages of the buying journey. They’re consuming more information from more sources, discovering new products on social media through savvy ad targeting, and comparing prices across sites.
How the Customer Lifecycle Has Changed
The shift from a linear customer lifecycle to one that looks more like a pretzel means it’s imperative for merchants to deliver seamless, guided experiences. This includes making it easier to discover products, engage with brands, consume relevant information, purchase quickly and easily, and then build a meaningful post-purchase relationship.
As part of this linear to nonlinear shift , merchants are getting better data about consumer interest and preferences that can help shape future content initiatives. For example, let’s say the data shows that half of your viewers watch a video about Topic 1, then jump to Topic 4, and then go back to Topic 2, but totally skip Topic 3. By analyzing these behaviors, we can understand not only which videos are most effective at driving purchases, but perhaps in which order the videos should be presented.
When examining this nonlinear buying journey, we see a clear common denominator: Customers now want, and have, more control over their buying journey than ever before. From online reviews to video, social posts to comparison shopping, the connected digital aspect of e-commerce empowers consumers to create their own journey. And they’ve gotten used to this variety of options and level of control.
Interactive video elements are particularly effective in giving customers more control over their journey. However, this level of control comes with its own level of responsibility. More choices and options means the post-purchase experience is that much more important to the overall lifecycle.
How to Incorporate Interactive Video Features
Even as consumers take a nonlinear path to purchase, the stages of the lifecycle have largely remained unchanged. Fortunately, there are many opportunities to incorporate interactive video elements into each stage. The following best practices can help get you started.
Awareness and Discovery
For customers in this phase of the lifecycle, the goal is to create a positive and memorable impression of your brand and build awareness of your offerings. Shorter videos (1 minute or less) like product sizzles and brand overviews tend to work best here. You want to help them easily discover the many different aspects of your products while also giving them opportunities to explore further.
Since potential customers are likely exploring and researching other options, the interactive elements should produce an engaging and succinct video experience.

Sentiment. Simple elements like a thumbs up/down, star ratings, or emojis give viewers the power to tell you if they’re enjoying the content or product. In addition to engagement, they offer you valuable insights that can help you adjust your approach based on viewer input.
Overlays. When clicked, overlays can lead viewers to webpages with more detailed or logical next-step information. These allow interested customers to learn more without interrupting the flow of the video. Buy-now buttons can also be appropriate at this stage, especially if the product is simple and doesn’t require deeper explanation.
Video-to-Video Branching. Like overlays, video-to-video branching offers viewers the opportunity to get more information, but through video and without ever leaving the video experience. Keep in mind that viewers at this stage do more window shopping than in-depth research, so don’t get too aggressive with related info links.

By knowing your goals and purposely selecting the interactive elements, you can build a strong foundation that sets up the following phases in the journey.
Conversion and Purchase
For consumers considering a purchase, the goal is to make it easier for them to make a final decision while delivering a seamless purchase experience. Medium-length videos (2-5 minutes) that provide comprehensive details about your product work best during this phase. Content including product demos, how-to videos, and user reviews should be a primary focus.
During this phase, you’ll want to make sure your content is informative and not overly promotional. The following interactive features can help with this approach.

Chapters. Viewers at this stage are conducting research. That means they’re skimming and searching for content that answers their questions before making a purchase. And while in-depth videos are better equipped to answer those questions, videos are difficult to skim. That’s where chapters come in. Adding chapters to videos is like adding subheadings to a blog post. They break up the content into bite-size sections, allowing viewers to quickly find what they’re looking for.
Video-to-Video Branching. Essentially crosslinking for video, video-to-video branching works even better at this stage. These viewers have higher intent, so they’re more likely to interact, allowing you to collect more data and further refine the experience. In other words, giving more control of the customer journey gives you more insights to make it better.
Overlays. Beyond related videos, other relevant content like technical specifics, expanded product uses, user reviews, or customer success stories can be linked to with overlays. This is also where you want to make strategic use of buy-now buttons. A one-click experience to complete the purchase minimizes unnecessary steps and helps avoid potential drop-offs.

Knowing your conversion goals, optimizing your video content, and utilizing suitable interactive features are critical for guiding your users from the consideration to conversion phase. They’ll also help deliver a seamless and enjoyable shopping experience, which leads directly into the next phase.
Retention and Advocacy
With purchase complete, it’s important to begin fostering brand loyalty, laying the foundation for increased customer lifetime value and transforming buyers into brand advocates. Or, simply put, your content should demonstrate why your product works well and why so many people are using it. Medium-long (3-10 minutes), personable videos that offer a behind-the-scenes look, tips and tricks, or unique features and uses of your product work best.
Consumers at the post-purchase phase are usually willing to give you more of their attention, which nicely aligns with a few interactive video elements.

Personalized Content. Leverage the viewing data and insights you’ve collected to offer personalized viewing experiences. This can mean more than using their name in the video. You could reference their purchase history and offer videos of accessories that complement a recent purchase. By showing customers that you understand their preferences and can cater to them, you’ll help build a deeper bond and drive brand affinity.
Polls and Feedback. Show your customers that their opinions matter even after the purchase by embedding polls or custom forms in your videos. These tools can give you valuable insights from some of your most high-value audiences: those who have bought and used your product.
Chat Features. Chat will allow you to engage directly with your customers to understand any questions or challenges they may have after purchasing the product. Combined with personalization, this feature especially helps demonstrate their importance as your customer.

Interactive Video Best Practices
With a solid understanding of how interactive elements can support the different phases of the customer lifecycle, there are some general best practices to be mindful of.

Err on the Side of Moderation. While interactivity leads to deeper engagement, too much interactivity can be distracting. Be mindful of the message you want to communicate and that too much interactivity doesn’t detract from that or overwhelm viewers.
Align Interactivity with Video Goals. Clearly understand your objectives for each video and ensure that every interactive element supports these objectives. Each point of interactivity should be specifically designed to guide the viewer towards achieving your desired action or outcome.
Prioritize Usability. Interactive features are only effective to the extent that people use them. To increase the likelihood of engagement, make sure that each element is:

Easily noticeable
Intuitive
On screen long enough for viewers to recognize it and engage with it
Clear about what the intended action should be (for example, if the interactive feature is designed for viewers to schedule an appointment, this should be explicitly stated to eliminate any potential confusion)

Gradually Increase Interactivity. As customers move farther along in their journey, their level of engagement usually increases. Match this progression by gradually introducing more sophisticated interactive elements that correspond to their growing attention and involvement.
Provide a “Return on Engagement” at Each Stage. Meaningless interactivity or engagements that don’t provide value can be counterproductive. Each one should offer a reward or benefit that is meaningful enough to justify the user’s time and engagement. There are a variety of ways that this can be achieved, from useful information to unique insights to personalized experiences they wouldn’t get elsewhere.

Beyond deeper and more meaningful engagements, these best practices can help your interactive elements serve as an invisible guide throughout their journey. They’ll help transform your videos from merely more content into powerful tools in your overall e-commerce strategy.
Interactivity for the Modern Shopper
The era of linear customer lifecycles and quality-based customer retention is in decline. In its place, the nonlinear approach to buying requires merchants to engage and guide users along their journey.
As customers expect more control, engagement, and value from the companies they buy from, interactive video elements can help fulfill these expectations throughout the lifecycle. In short, these consumers want to be active participants as opposed to passive audiences. Interactivity can help bridge this gap while fundamentally reshaping the customer lifecycle to become more sustainable and customer-centric.
As you look to incorporate more interactive elements, keep in mind that it’s not just about making e-commerce more convenient. It’s about crafting a more dynamic, personalized, and sustainable customer lifecycle for the modern shopper.

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Modern marketers have their work cut out for them when it comes to hitting their goals. Whether they’re focused on demand generation, brand awareness, or other core marketing responsibilities, marketers are contending with a crowded, noisy digital landscape.
Numerous tools can help marketers elevate their messages and break through the noise, but video is one of the most effective.
For years, digital video consumption has continued to rise. During the pandemic, that gradual increase in viewership accelerated. A few years later, the appetite for video has not waned. And that appetite, as it pertains to marketers, spans all industries and audience segments.
While it’s great for marketers to have proven resources like video content to project their messages, that effectiveness also increases demand. Companies and teams now want a video for nearly everything, from social media posts and video ads to videos in email outreach and video blogs. All these requests for videos put a hefty strain on teams that may already be dealing with limited resources and budgets.
Keeping up with the demand for video means managing all the resources you have available, including current video content, old content, and even content from other teams.
Cut Long Videos into Short Clips
A common question marketers ask is, “How do I create more video content without drastically increasing my budget?” When facing resource and budget pressures, it makes sense that many marketers want to optimize.
One of the first places to start is your existing media library. Webinars, recorded presentations, customer case studies, and other long-form videos can be repurposed in several different ways.

Social media clips. Clip brief segments that can be used in social media posts or quotable snippets that can be used for a variety of promotional purposes.
Highlight reels. Cut highlights and use them to tease the full-length video on your resources page or on a landing page.
Video Ads. Pull short clips that can be used to promote your brand, like product announcements or customer quotes.
Immersive Blogs. Clip sections that can be embedded in a blog post to deliver a more immersive, interactive video experience.

Anytime you create a long-form video, look for opportunities to pull shorter clips. A single feature-length piece could turn into a dozen snackable shorts used in a variety of applications.
Promote Old Videos in New Ways
The most effective content is fit for purpose: customized to its promoting channel and personalized to its target audience. However, this content best practice runs the risk of limiting your video assets to single-use applications and diluting their long-term value.
Just think about all the videos and content you’ve created for a specific event or project. What happened to those videos afterward? Were they forgotten in the depths of your media library? Perhaps they’re buried somewhere on your corporate resources page on your website?
Chances are you’re sitting on a wealth of materials that can be used with a minimal amount of effort, using the right tactics.

Refresh old topics. Webinars get stale and their data outdated, but their themes often remain relevant. Perhaps the presentation featured customers, partners, or team members who have moved on, but the substance of what was covered is still sound. It can be a quick and relatively painless process to update the supporting assets and re-record the video.
Test new channels. Knowing where an audience will engage your content isn’t the same as knowing where they won’t. After publishing your video to its primary destination, get creative and try publishing on new channels to see if those audiences engage. For example, embed brand story videos on product pages to build buyer confidence, or include videos in sales pitch decks to make them more dynamic.

When you create videos, think about how you can maximize efficiency by meeting a variety of audience needs. Are they trying to understand your brand, researching your products, or looking to make a purchase? Audiences expect content that addresses these things along their journey, so think through the touchpoints you have and what your audience wants at each stage.
Leverage Videos Outside Your Team
Increasingly, teams outside marketing are tasked with creating, managing, and publishing video content. Whether that’s human resources, talent acquisition, product, customer support, sales, or others, everyone is looking to capitalize on the benefits of video.
The upside for marketers is that they can often lean on the materials these teams create to supplement their own video needs. Depending on your business, there may be multiple resources you can tap into for video content.

Brand. Brand-centric storytelling produces great content that can be used for a variety of purposes. For example, employee testimonials sourced by corporate comms can be incorporated into brand stories that marketing promotes on social media and the website. They can also be shared with HR to use for other purposes like new-hire orientation and welcome videos. By sharing resources, many teams can maximize their video output.
Customer Success. In the B2C space, brands often create content that resellers can use on product listing pages, such as customer testimonials sourced by customer success teams.
Training. In B2B, there may be internal teams producing content focused on training or educating customers or users. With some minor edits, that content could be used externally for marketing purposes if it aligns with what a viewer is looking for along their journey.

Think outside your team’s library of videos when looking to repurpose content. With the barrier to video creation dropping as new tools and technologies make it easier, more teams are incorporating video into their workflows. By reaching out across the organization, you may find plenty of content you can reuse and repurpose to advance your team’s video initiatives.
Get Creative with Repurposing Video
As you start to consider how to repurpose your video content and apply it to your campaigns or projects, you’ll think of other creative ways to get more out of your videos. You may even start to approach the video creation process with a new view of how you’ll use that asset for multiple projects well into the future. By adopting some of the tips above, you’ll uncover your own methods for optimizing video.

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Video landing pages are the best of both worlds. Landing pages offer streamlined layouts designed to highlight the call to action (CTA), while video offers better engagement and content consumption data. Together, they create a highly efficient conversion experience that you might be tempted to optimize for search.
Indeed, the visibility that search affords your content can be significant. Plus, video SEO has only gotten easier, so not indexing video landing pages can seem like leaving money on the table. But there’s another important use case that can’t be ignored: A/B testing.
Why A/B Testing Is Important
Testing is a key ingredient in effective marketing strategies. It segments the audiences, refines the messages, and maps content to the right channels. The time investment can be substantial, but the payoff is worth it.
Sadly, one of the reasons why proper testing is often neglected is because marketing efforts can generate a lot of data while delivering revenue and leads. In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear inexperienced marketers refer to simply running multiple campaigns as testing. If Campaign A outperforms Campaign B, they might say that they tested Campaign B and “it didn’t work.”
However, comparing campaign performance should never be mistaken for testing. Performance data can uncover trends and provide corrective insights, but only testing can reveal the factors driving performance and identify the formulas for repeatable success.
A/B testing, in particular, is a powerful tool for isolating variables and returning controlled results. A/B testing uses two identical pieces of content with a single variable changed—like a headline. That way, if the control (A) loses to the variant (B) in the test, the loss can be attributed to the headline.
Controlling for variables is the goal, but testing is never immune to chance. A single variable should be A/B tested at least three times to confirm the results and the entire process repeated for subsequent variables. This kind of proven data can then be applied to messaging and content to predictably enhance marketing strategies.
Why Landing Pages Are Important for A/B Testing
Marketers who’ve performed tests know that the more data you have, the more accurate your results will be. This is why optimizing a landing page for search can seem like a valid tactic: a bigger audience should mean better test results.
However, the biggest challenge with testing is controlling the audience. No matter what your SEO tool, agency, or consultant tells you, you can never know the breakdown of an organic audience. Between the death of third-party cookies and the prevalence of anonymized browsing, the available data is too spotty to be actionable.
Controlling the audience is precisely what unindexed, unlisted landing pages are designed to do. Coupled with email, a high-intent owned channel, they are the perfect testing sandboxes. With a good marketing automation platform (MAP), you can take a selected cohort and split them into equal, randomized segments.
Why Video Is Important for A/B Testing
Testing headlines and calls to action is relatively straightforward, but if you want to A/B test overall topics and content, you really need video.
Despite what web metrics like time on page or scroll depth suggest, measuring the content consumption of written content is notoriously difficult. Between multiple tabs, pop-up ads, and distractions from the family pet, written content simply has too many variables outside the marketer’s control.
Video content is different from written content for a few reasons:

Video is more engaging. Emails promoting videos generate higher click-through rates . Not only does this represent higher intent, it means more views and more accurate results.
Video is more captivating. With higher intent comes increased attention. Video also tends to have a more captive audience simply due to the sensory stimulation of sound and moving images.
Video is more calculating. Every second of video that’s viewed is a quantifiable measurement of content consumption. Higher intent and attention imbue this number with more accuracy.

To be clear, no content format is completely free of behavioral variables. Viewers can drag a video slider (called “scrubbing”) just as easily as they can scroll a webpage. In fact, the longer the content is, the more likely they are to do so with either format. The difference is this behavior is far less common with video, especially video on landing pages with an engaged email audience.
Tips for A/B Testing with Video Landing Pages
There are lots of best practices related to A/B testing, but when video is involved, there are some unique things you can do.
Select the Best Audience
Creating equal, randomized segments is the easy part—most MAPs can do this automatically. Choosing which cohort of customers to segment can be tricky. Thankfully, marketers have lots of data available, particularly content data.

Customer Data. If your goal is to test interest in two new products, you should start by segmenting your customer list by purchase history. This would include not only purchases of similar products with similar price points, but purchase frequency as well. Customers with a single purchase are less likely to have an interest in new products than customers with multiple purchases.
Marketing Data. Next, you should refine this segment by excluding customers who haven’t clicked through an email within a certain period of time, like the past 90 days. Some people just don’t open marketing emails, so including them dilutes your sample size. Furthermore, they can pollute your test results with outliers who sporadically open emails to rage-click through the content.
Content Data. Finally, your segment should account for your customers’ viewing habits. For example, Brightcove offers Audience Insights: a customer data platform that can segment audiences by watch history and other key inputs. This data is then automatically synced with CRM and MAP tools to trigger emails and other targeted communications. With Audience Insights, you can drill down further and select customers who are particularly engaged by product videos.

Keep in mind that audience segmentation is a delicate process. A highly refined segment is worthless if the sample size is too small; the results won’t be statistically significant. So don’t make your test parameters too specific, and keep your final cohort over 1,000 .
Create the Best Experience
Video landing page experiences should be as easy to consume as they are to create. Employing the following features will improve the customer experience and enhance the test results.

Autoplay. This may be the only time in marketing history that an autoplayed video is welcomed by its audience. Unlike the autoplayed video ads and social media videos that can erode engagement with complaints, email users expect videos to autoplay. Your email copy has already made it clear they’re clicking to watch a video, so don’t make them click again.
Low-code templates. Some CMSs are easy to use, and even some MAPs offer landing pages, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be optimized for displaying video. Using a low-code landing page template from an OVP like Brightcove, you can quickly design a slick layout that keeps the video experience responsive and above the fold. The templates are easy to customize, but you can also add custom CSS to more closely match your website’s branding and style.
Interactivity. A video’s engagement rate tells you more about content consumption than written content ever could. Interactive video is a step further. With interactive features like sentiment or polling, you can get an even clearer picture of which video performed better. Just be sure to limit the interactive elements so they’re not overwhelming. With Brightcove Interactivity, you can easily monitor this with the Interaction Rate.

When Not to Optimize Content for Search
As generative AI hype pushes into the search engine world, SEO is becoming more of a meme than a best practice. Certainly, it’s a critical tool of the digital age, but some tactics work better without it. A/B testing is one such tactic that is no less valuable and works best when video landing pages are not optimized for search.

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The last few years have tested the agility and adaptation of every marketing team. Physical events went digital. Digital events had to get interesting. Video marketing became more important than ever, and teams had to think about how the sales process worked in both remote and hybrid environments.
B2B video marketing is moving beyond awareness and driving engagements and conversions at each touchpoint in the marketing funnel. In fact, when we interviewed marketing leaders, the topic of discussion wasn’t whether video marketing could drive conversions. It was about the strategy and tech stack needed to do it.
Learn more in our PLAY episode, “What’s New, What’s Not and What Matters Most to CMOs Today.”
Rethinking the Hybrid Experience
Traditional digital media and video marketing tactics like webinars aren’t keeping people’s attention or driving conversions.
That’s what Margaret Franco, CMO of Finastra , realized as she helped her team adapt to a digital-first environment during COVID-19 lockdowns. Part of the reason is that video marketing, for many teams, is still focused on driving top-of-funnel activities like awareness without building the relationship afterwards. Without in-person meetings and industry events, the Finastra team knew that the customer journey across video marketing had to be personal. From brand awareness to conversion and retention, video had to break through a noisy digital environment where everyone was remote and often distracted.
For Finastra, the video content strategy started by rethinking the video marketing tech stack. As Finastra’s VP of Marketing, Joerg Kleuckmann, puts it, “It all kicked off from an experience I had when COVID started. I was clicking on an ad from a competitor because they had a digital event, and I thought it was our event, and I got confused.” Not only that, when people did access video content from Finastra, they got distracted by something else on YouTube.
Many marketing leaders dealt with similar challenges. Latané Conant, CMO of 6Sense , says that every marketer has to be an “octopus.” They have to cover different disciplines and teams in order to understand what type of video is best for the company and the customer.
Paige O’Neill, Chief Marketing Officer at Sitecore , believes that content is still the biggest challenge, whether a hybrid or digital or in-person format: “How do we connect the dots between the two and serve up that experience for customers?”
In a hybrid environment where people engage online and offline, marketing teams must provide an ongoing journey customized to what personas need the most. B2B video marketing must be more like events, and events must be more like digital multimedia. Both tactics require a lifecycle strategy that builds a relationship with attendees before, during, and after the experience.
To reinvent the team’s B2B video marketing strategy, Finastra launched Finastra TV in 2022 to broadcast video content related to the banking industry. The channel allows viewers to find the content most relevant to their industry and engage with it at their own pace.

“We’re going to build the Netflix for the financial services industry,” Franco says. “Finastra TV is always promoting. It’s always engaging.”
Most importantly, first-party data became the foundation for the new video marketing strategy from the start.
Learn more in our PLAY episode, “Finastra TV: Building Your Own Company Channel.”
Video Marketing with First-Party Data
Streaming platforms like Vimeo or YouTube can host video content, but they offer limited analytics tools. The same goes for social channels, where marketers can measure views and understand viewer demographics but not how qualified they really are as prospects. This is why measuring the success of video marketing often only goes as deep as top-of-funnel metrics like views, social shares, and time watched.
To create a B2B video marketing strategy with the personalization power of Netflix, marketers must focus on collecting first-party data from viewers. By understanding individual prospect behavior across all video content, marketers can better understand people’s interests and viewing habits and follow up at an individual level.
The first step for this kind of video marketing is simple: create video content that your prospects want to view. As Conant explains, teams should organize video production in the same way that “media companies deal with content.” By starting with the market fit for the product—and the content that establishes that market fit—teams can plan content for each persona.
At Finastra, the team created a content strategy based on different seasons and topics that consist of 10 to 15 episodes per topic. The goal was to build a digital stage that drove opportunities, not just views. Every viewer who accesses Finastra TV fills out a form once with relevant contact information and then has the freedom to watch all the episodes. This first-party data is automatically routed to Finastra’s CRM, which in turn scores the lead based on viewing activity.

“We developed a custom solution on the channel where we dropped a cookie behind the user’s first Marketo registration form,” Klueckmann explains. “Gating is a thing of the past. Forms are a thing of the past.”
Finastra TV, which is built with Brightcove, now offers the sales teams an opportunity to follow up based specifically on which videos the lead viewed with a CRM integration that analyzes who is most engaged based—and what conversations may be most relevant to them. Event content is repurposed to make it video-first and, since then, Finastra TV is fully integrated with the customer journey.
A Transparent Journey
COVID-19 taught teams valuable new digital tactics to persevere through an unprecedented challenge. The next step is to integrate those tactics with real-world events and interactions. This all starts with understanding the tech stack that you need to see each customer touchpoint as it happens, whether online or offline.
“We’re in a hybrid journey right now,” says Paige O’Neill from Sitecore. “How do we bring the best of digital but go back to those customer interactions?”
By offering Finastra TV, the team saw a 26x increase in ROI from physical events, capturing the potential of a hybrid customer journey in new ways. This wouldn’t be possible without the first-party data integrations that help Finastra understand exactly who is watching what and passing that information to the sales team.
As B2B video marketing follows the success of streaming platforms, the importance of customer data is only going to grow. By building a data-first multimedia strategy, you can ensure that video content is fully integrated from the first touch of the customer journey to the last.

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