AI Video Personalisation Increases Auto Finance Renewals +30%

Summary

Towards the end of contract is the moment of highest risk and highest opportunity in automotive finance. Customers approaching the end of an agreement are being courted by every competitor, and generic renewal emails struggle to cut through.

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This summer Kortical launched their AI video personalisation platform and there were some early adopters, with leading UK car and motorcycle brands looking to answer a simple question: if every customer received a video that was genuinely about them, their car, their contract, their settlement position and their upgrade options, would they engage more and renew more?

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The answer was emphatic. Send a highly personalised video and you will see renewals. Where model uplift numbers can feel abstract to commercial stakeholders, this campaign produced results everyone could feel: renewal rates more than doubled among engaged viewers, and within a single month one brand went from behind its renewals target to ahead of it.

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This video is an illustration of how you can personalise data points aligned to your objectives.

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The imperative for change

Automotive brands hold rich data on every customer: the vehicle they drive, where they are in their finance agreement, their settlement figure, their local retailer and the offers available to them. Yet most renewal communication reduces all of that to a templated email with a first name at the top and the rest gets ignored.

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The cost of that gap is very expensive. Renewal is where customer lifetime value is won or lost, and every customer who lapses at end of contract is not only a lost sale but then a new more expensive lead has to convert to make up for it. The brands wanted a way to make each customer's position, and their best next step, unmistakably clear at the moment it mattered most.

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Personalised video promised exactly that, but most video personalisation on the market only skims the surface, overlaying a name or limited captions onto an otherwise generic video. The brands needed something deeper: video where the story itself changes with the data.

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The AI video personalisation solution

Kortical's approach generates a genuinely individual video for every customer, automatically, from the data the brand already holds. It uses the brand footage that already exists and AI edits that to the best clips for the script.  No film crew, no manual editing, no per-customer production cost.

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Data in. Customer and agreement data flows in securely: vehicle, contract position, settlement figure, local retailer and available offers.  We are integrated into Keyloop renewal platforms and DMS and can integrate into any that you use today. 

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AI assembles the story. The platform turns that data into an individual script and creates the video template and edits based on the objective and story the brand wants to tell.  

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Unique voiceover and captions for every customer. This is where the approach differs from anything else on the market. Most personalised video does not personalise the voice, or at best inserts the customer's name. Kortical generates a full voiceover and captions unique to each customer, personalising as many points as the data allows: their name, their vehicle, their settlement figure, their upgrade, their retailer. The base video can stay fairly static because the voice and captions carry the personalisation, which keeps production simple while making every video feel one to one.

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Delivered where customers already are. The video lands in the customer's inbox, with a unique thumbnail and landing page with a clear call to action: book a test drive, review renewal options or speak to a retailer.

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Measured against a holdout. Results are compared against a matched cohort who did not receive the campaign, so the uplift reported is genuinely incremental. There is a full reporting dashboard to measure the impact 

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The brands deployed this across three campaign types: Welcome campaigns to set up the relationship from day one and to educate for higher customer satisfaction, Tactical campaigns to bring time-limited offers to life and encourage customers to renew early on in their lifecycle, and End of Contract campaigns where the renewal is key.

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The business impact

The engagement numbers tell the first half of the story. Click through rate doubled versus standard campaigns, and between 85 and 92% of viewers watched their video all the way through, depending on the content, engaging for over a minute. These are not passive impressions; they are highly engaged customers giving the brand their full attention. This is where the magic happens. 

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The second half is what that attention converted into. Personalised video drove a +30% higher renewal rate than static email campaigns. Among customers who watched the video and clicked the call to action, renewals were up +115% versus a matched cohort who never received the campaign, more than double. When the message is this relevant to a customer's financial position and their desired upgrade, engagement translates directly into sales.

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One moment captures it well: a customer eight months from contract end opened a video showing their exact settlement figure, and booked a test drive the same day.

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The commercial result was an ROI of over 1000%, measured on the additional interest generated (if it was the contract value that would be even higher!), per renewal generated by the campaign. Every £10k spent returned over £100k. In just one month, that moved the customer from missing their renewal target to exceeding it.

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Time to value. The first campaign takes 2 to 3 months to get right, including data integration and the brand's own governance and legal approvals. From then on, tweaking a campaign or adding new customers to the target list takes 1 to 2 weeks. 

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Frequently asked questions

What is AI video personalisation? AI video personalisation uses customer data to automatically generate a unique video for each individual, at scale. Kortical's approach personalises the full voiceover and captions, not just a name overlay, covering as many data points as are available, such as the customer's vehicle, settlement figure and local retailer.

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How is this different from other personalised video? Most personalised video keeps a generic voiceover and, at most, inserts the customer's name. Kortical generates a voiceover and captions unique to every customer, so the story itself changes with the data. They also need a large team to create the initial video making it expensive to truly scale to every customer you have in a personalised way. 

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How was the renewal uplift measured? Two ways. The +30% uplift compares personalised video against static email campaigns, a like for like channel comparison. The +115% uplift compares customers who watched and clicked against a matched cohort of similar customers who never received the campaign, so the result is genuinely incremental rather than correlation.

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How long does it take to launch? Typically 2 to 3 months for the first campaign, including governance and legal timelines. After that, updates and new target lists take 1 to 2 weeks and can be largely automated.

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Does this work beyond end of contract campaigns? Yes. The same brands ran Welcome and Tactical campaigns with the same approach, driving higher test drive bookings alongside higher renewals.

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Want results like these? Get in touch via the contact form below to see an example campaign built on your data.

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