I often find myself thinking about how to grow — people, revenue, me — and looking for activities that have high leverage.
By “high leverage,” I mean things that can be done or performed once and multiplied many times over.
At times, however, I stumble on an idea that doesn’t fit this definition but seems to have enough value that it makes sense to at least give it a shot — even if the idea itself isn’t necessarily scalable.
One such example is an experiment we’re running: sending highly personalized videos to all new family members, as well as other people who are at various point in their lifecycle with us.
Instead of sending the same video to everyone, I record a short 60-80 second video that uses the person’s name and other information about their specific situation.
Sometimes I’m welcoming them to the family, other times I’m inviting them to a particular training class — or at other points, just saying “thank you” and asking a leading question.
Here’s what the message looks like (and if you want to play the video, scroll down):
… and here’s the video:
… which I know is a bit hard to read, so here it is with some formatting:
Hello David,
Thank you for the personal message and for checking in on how things are going 😊
We successfully launched 3 purl direct mail campaign and 2 micro/digital ad campaigns this week so that was exciting.
Iram, Kushal, Pronit and the support team at Mindfire is by far the best I have worked with.
Everyone has addressed every question and concern promptly and resolved any issues we ran into immediately to make these campaigns run successfully. My mind has not stopped since being introduced to Mindfire. Haha! The possibilities seem endless.
I’ve learned so much in the last week of walking through these campaigns and what to do different next time to clean these up. I can’t wait to see where it goes from here. We run a lot of co-op variable campaigns that we gang many retailer together and have always designed the microsite to the lowest offer.
I was instantly intrigued when seeing the rules that I can not only run these 20 retailers variably, but I now have the potential to run the same microsite with different offers for these retailers locations as well. This capability is going to open a lot of doors for us.
Not only for this particular campaign that we mail every week but with other direct mail campaigns we gang together and mail on proximity programs. We would be able to add purls to their mailings and interchange variables, logos and art as well. I’ve been nothing but impressed with both platforms.
The only minor note I would make on Davinci would be that it would be nice to be able to make changes on the alert and download email variables within Davinci on a quick out to door campaign that doesn’t take a lot of set up. I have to go into Studio to change all the variable I want included in the html on my retailers alerts. But that is the only thing I have noticed so far. And that’s just a minor inconvenience.
The team at Mindfire has been incredibly supportive in helping to educate me on the platforms, how it can meet our individual needs and addressing every one of my many questions. Their expertise on which platform is the most efficient for what I need to accomplish has been helpful and everyone has been generous with their time and efforts. I appreciate all the help and support to make this transition successful.
Thank you, Christina Steiner
Would I have I received the same level of input had I sent an automated email?
My gut tells me no. But who knows.
What I do know is that this is just one example of MANY positive responses we’ve seen from something that most people consider too manual a process.
“I have to record 20 videos in a row? Are you crazy, man?”
“Plus, I don’t want to be on camera! Look at my hair!”
“I’m way too busy to do that for each Client!”
If these thoughts are going through your head — whether it be about using personalized video or anything else that doesn’t seem to be scalable — then I humbly suggest you consider (just consider!) reevaluating.
Look at Christina’s words above. They’re gold.
What opportunities are you be missing because they don’t seem scalable?
Wherever you land with this thought, Christina’s email made my day; so here’s to things that don’t scale! 😜
