Oliver Bridge is the CMO at Bonjoro, an app for sending personalized videos to welcome and onboard new customers. In this episode, he joins Ward to discuss steps and best tips to create a great converting video without spending hours recording it.
✍️ Show Notes
- Bonjoro’s Video Funnel Playbook
- YouTube
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📄 Show Transcript
This transcript is computer generated, please excuse any errors 🙂
Ward Sandler: Welcome everyone today. I’m talking to Oli Bridge, the CMO at Bonjoro, an app for sending individual personalized videos to welcome and onboard new customers and clients. Oli has extensive knowledge of startups and marketing. Today is here to talk to us about all things video-marketing. Oli, welcome to the Membership Maker Podcast. We’re delighted to have you!
Oliver Bridge: Yeah. Good to talk to you again, excited to share some more stuff about video today!
Ward Sandler: Awesome. Now is the perfect time to nail the basics of video production and promotion as a major component of the membership marketing plan, what actually makes a great converting video?
Oliver Bridge: Okay. So I’d say you first got to break things down. Think about the journey of your video, so I always break it down into, you want to get this thing opened to say it’s like a video email. You want to get it open, like this number one, objective. The next thing is you want to get it watched, and then the third element is you want to drive action. So you want to get your lead or your customer or whoever it might be to actually do something. So, you know, think about those three parts of the video’s journey itself, and then focus down on those. So for me, like when you think about opens, like subject lines, is super important with video, but actually the same rules don’t apply to video that applies to like email marketing. It’s like email marketing it’s like trying to, almost trying to like trick the person on the other side. So I didn’t feel like opening your email and it gets really awkward and it’s really difficult. I know struggle with it. But video, yeah, the trick isn’t that it’s, it’s just honesty and telling them what’s literally in that video. So for example, your subject line on a personalized video might be, ‘Hey, name. I recorded a personal video for you just now’ Yeah, that’s going to peak their curiosity. You don’t have to play around with all the marketing talk, literally just say ‘I recorded your personal video’ or something along those lines or ‘Welcome to the community. Here’s a video I recorded for you’ or ‘Here’s a video welcome’. So yeah, keep that bit simple. That’s going to get you great open rates. Timeliness is key. So we’ve done a study here, actually, we did a big split test amongst our team, like how quick do you have to send a video when a customer event takes place? So if a customer does something like signs up for your lead magnet or so-and-so for trial and TCO memberships community, how quickly do you do something to get the best result? And we sold the, anything within about four hours was like super high after four hours. You’d definitely get a bit of a tail off. So if you can do this stuff quickly, you know, obviously sometimes it’s difficult, but we always think, yes, the sooner, the better is really key for the open rates. And then you want to get stuff watched. So like once your video is out there in that inbox, what’s going to help it get watched? So like key things there, once it’s in their inbox, you’re going to have a thumbnail of your video. So you want to sort of smile, like you want to do a wave, like try and get your thumbnail, like looking inviting for the person on the other side. So they’re actually going to think, ‘Oh, what’s this. They look quite frankly.’ You don’t wanna like scare them off, and then also just like, well, let, maybe in a natural environment, like I always do mine on a walk, like okay, for a walk at lunch. Take my mobile app, like do my videos. I just feel more comfortable, more relaxed, and that definitely helps get better. Click through rates into actual video. You can do stuff on our platform as well. You can do things like, uh, gift previews. So you’ve actually got a gift going on, like in their inbox. Uh, you could hold up a whiteboard with someone’s name on it, so they know it’s definitely just for them. So they’re more likely to click through to it, and then like, I guess the key part it’s the video itself so that the journey would get opened, get what’s drive action. So the driving action bit is all about getting clicked through and getting replies as well. So something I do on every video is at the start of the video. Obviously, I said that name. I said like, Hey ward. Um, but I’ll say, ‘Hey, I recorded this video for you’ I just wanted to share two things with you or share three things with you, and I tell them exactly what I’m going to share. And I also say how long it’s going to take. So I want to share three things. It’s going to take one minute, and then you’ve got the attention. Then you can like go through those things, and you’re basically giving them a roadmap through your video to sort of stick with you on that journey. And then the other two components, like in your video, when you’re, when you’re doing it, talk to your call to action. So you’ve got a great chance there. Someone is watching your video, take the opportunity to drive action. So tell them in the last 10 seconds now, a lot of people do on YouTube, like, like, and subscribe that sort of stuff, you know, tell them, click that button. Here’s the next step, but I guess be careful, like only have one next step. It’s like outline it really clearly and get them to take that next step… And then the last bit is asking for a reply again, you’ve got that engagement. You call that opportunity that is watching your video, ask them to reply. So like maybe just like put out there like a pointed question, like, what did you want to learn from my community? Something like that, and you’re still getting a lot of great replies from your people.
Ward Sandler: Yeah. A lot of good stuff to dig in there. So in terms of the initial step, in the email that contained the video, right? In the subject line, you mentioned something along the lines of, ‘Hey, I recorded a personal video for you’, that actually does seem to work, right? Cause it’s like, even if you’re sceptical and you received that email, you’re going to be like, wait, did they really? And like open it just out pure curiosity, just be like, let me see if this is if this is real and then clicking and like then when they’re surprized, that, while that is real, then you kind of get that, that small moment of joy. I’ve just like, ‘Whoa. I didn’t think they would do something like that’ And like that, that already kind of puts you in the right emotional state with a customer. I feel like right.
Oliver Bridge: Yeah, totally. We had, when we originally built entourage, we locked down the subject line, so you couldn’t change it. And it was like, here’s a personal video recorded for you because it got incredible open rates. It got some, yeah, like,in the first year of bonds, it was say like 79% Open Rates across all of our customers million videos are so crazy. So it works. You can tweak it a little bit, but be a little bit careful because you do want to loose that curiosity. If someone’s got a video recorded just for them, they’re not going to delete that. Because if it not going in your mind, it turns in your mind ‘I wonder what they actually recorded for me’ So it just, yeah, it works well.
Ward Sandler: Yeah. Um, and then in terms of, uh, you’re saying, and the timeliness of when you send the video for the timeliness, you said within four hours, I’m curious. The only thing I would push back on that is when something like, for example, at MemberSpace, we actually just recently started using Bonjoro. I’ve been recording videos and it is very easy to use, but one thing that kind of I was thinking through was ‘All right, someone signs up for a trial, so we send them like a Welcome Email. It makes sense that that’s, that’s a bread and butter use case for you guys. I assume. So the problem is when someone signs up for a trial, they’re already going to be getting a Welcome email from us and, to comply with different credit card requirements. We also send them an email. Letting them know the length of their trial. So from our perspective, if we then were to send another email, which is, ‘Hey, here’s a personal video I recorded for you’ It might feel a little bit like overload, like too many emails, so what sould you suggest in that particular case? I assume some other customers or some other listeners have a similar thing where maybe, maybe two emails get sent out already when someone signs up. Would you want to space it out closer to the four hours mark this way? Like, you get those two emails right away and then maybe four hours later, then the welcoming…
Oliver Bridge: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So let’s see what we do here is we have the same thing we send out a welcome email is automated in that welcome email that says like, welcome to Pandora PS, watch out for like a personal welcome. So we prompt them, and actually, yeah, sometimes then we send it like six hours after that. Like, I guess it’s like, look at your own funnel. If you’ve already got two emails going out. Then that’s cool. Maybe wait 24 hours, and if they’re opening those and they are engaging, you’re just going to add to that engagement and add to the activation the following day when you send you a personal video. So don’t fret on that too much. You could AB test it’s like you could lift one of your existing emails out an AB test in bonds. You’re with the same action, like the same call to action that you already had in your other email. Um, so definitely AB tests are the best. Yeah, the results we’ve seen from bonds, people really AB testing against their existing funnel set up
Ward Sandler: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Oli. We really appreciate it. Would you like to share resources or recommendations for folks trying to learn more about Bonjoro?
Oliver Bridge: Yeah, I would. So I wrote a thing last year called the Video Funnel Playbook. This is basically just like lots of templated, like pre-built plays for how you can use video, so if you go to the video funnel playbook, you can just Google it, and it should come up at the top, then it’s about 35 different points in your funnel that you can use video to get great results.
Ward Sandler: Thanks.
Oliver Bridge: Thanks, Ward.