MBA1528 Guest Teacher – Oli Bridge – How to Build Video Funnels for Your Business

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Hey, everyone. My name's Oli Bridge and I'm the head of marketing at Bonjoro. In the next 10 minutes, I'm going to teach you all about the powerful new sales and marketing approach called video funnels. I'll show you how, with just a little effort, video funnels can help make you more sales and turn your existing customers into loyal superfans. Okay, first up, I wanted to share a staggering and slightly depressing statistic with you before we get going. The average office worker receives 120 emails every day. 120. And that's just the average. I'd wager a lot of you guys might get even more than that. Some of you may get way more. So this begs the question, how are we supposed to process all of this? How are we meant to know which emails deserve our time and which should go straight into the trash? I guess, to be honest, we end up choosing based on hundreds of subjective factors. Little factors like the person's name, the subject line of the email, how we feel at the time, maybe the opening sentence of the email, the tone, the perceived amount of time that they spent, perhaps, and all sorts of other things. The problem is, with the advent of automation, the number of messages that we receive and the amount of stuff we're meant to process has got pretty much out of control. And in many ways, we're slowly losing grip on one of the most fundamental cornerstones of business, human connection. So what's all this about? Why should you care about all this stuff? I'm telling you now on this episode, I wanted to introduce a new concept for you. I call it Video funnels. For the last two years, I've been teaching weekly webinars all about this new concept, and I wanted to help you master it, too. Let me quickly break down what I mean by video funnel. Then we'll go into how you can use them to grow your own business. To keep things easy, let's say A video funnel is made up of three parts. Okay, first up, there's a goal. So this might be a clear business goal that you want to accomplish. Let's say more sales conversions, more upsells from existing customers, or maybe more five star reviews. Secondly, there's a trigger event. So you can think of this as something your lead or your customer is doing in the customer journey, like maybe making an inquiry or joining your newsletter or buying a product from you. And then the last part of the funnel is a personalized video. This is the video you're going to send with a clear call to action with that helps you get the prospect or customer to take action. That's it. There's nothing too complex about all of this and honestly, I think there's way too many businesses out there that are making things a little too hard for themselves. Let's all stop talking about growth, hacking and things like that and leave that to Facebook's engineering team to worry about. So that's it. That's the concept. A video funnel is basically sending a personalized video to your customer based on a key trigger event with a clear call to action that helps you achieve your business goal. Will this video take more time than shooting out a generic text based email? Yeah, probably will. But what matters at the end of the day isn't how long it takes. It's about getting a response, building a connection, and getting a result for your business. Now we're going to go through a few simple funnels you can copy and use in your own business today that will help you make more sales, keep more customers and grow your business. Okay, let's dive into the first part of your video funnel engine conversion funnels. How about using a personalized video to respond to a new inquiry on your website rather than just firing back a regular email? Whilst I was researching a white paper last year, I found that customers are 70% more likely to respond to your emails if that email has a visual of you in it. Think about it. Your video that you're sending is proof that you've taken the time for that customer. And human psychology means they are much more likely to reciprocate the effort and respond to you. How about using videos to get more leads to show up for sales calls or demos? By dropping them a personal video in the days or the hours before the meeting or the demo, they'll see there's a real person behind that calendar appointment and feel much more invested in the process and meaning they'll be less likely to cancel. Or how about using video to get leads to attend your webinars. Just like with sales calls, reaching out to them personally and soliciting their input beforehand means they'll be primed for your content and eager to show up and support you. I do this myself for every webinar I run, and the attendance rates and engagement on my webinars is just night and day compared to when I was leaning on automated emails. You can even use video to follow up, maybe after a trade show meeting, or to rekindle a stagnant sales proposal. The crucial thing is that by doing things just a little bit differently and putting in just that little bit of extra effort and humanity, you will stand out against the tide of regular emails that that person gets every day, and you'll be more likely to cut through and get a response. Okay, just a little brief science interlude here. I wanted to explain to you very quickly why all of this stu works. Why does video work so well? It's all about this thing called the reticular activating system. What is this? It sounds a bit weird, doesn't it? Personalization in any walk of life is effective largely because of one shared human physiological mechanism. And it's this thing that I'm talking about, the reticular activating system. Let's maybe call it the RAS for short, to save a little bit of time. The RAS is a network of neurons located in your brain stem. I won't go into the biology too much here, but in everyday language, your RAS acts as a gateway to your conscious brain. It filters for information that you should pay attention to, and it helps you control the constant flow of signals reaching your senses in any given moment. Let's break this down a bit simpler. So when people talk about selective hearing, what they're really referencing is is the effect of the ras that is causing you to ignore some of the information being shared with you and pay attention to the other bits that you care about. An easy way to understand this effect is by thinking about what's called the cocktail party effect. It goes something a little bit like this. So imagine you're at a party with dozens of people chatting nearby. You'll easily tune out those conversations. But as soon as someone says something that is of particular interest to you, maybe your name or a film you just watched, you'll magically tune into their conversation. That's your RAs, your reticular activating system, activating your conscious brain. This is why personalized marketing is so much more effective than mass marketing. As humans, we are hardwired to respond to it and you can think of personalized video as a sort of gold standard in personalization. It taps into your customer's conscious brain and it gets their attention. Okay, let's move on to the next part of your video funnel Activation Funnels here's some simple ways you can use video to build deeper relationships with your existing customers. Okay, how about sending a simple thank you video when they buy a new product from you? Here at Bonjoro, we've seen countless examples of this bumping up repeat purchase rates by huge margins. Or how about personally asking for a review from your happiest and most engaged customers? If someone's having a great experience of your product, all you need to do is ask and they'll happily give you that review. One of our customers here made it onto number one on trustpilot in the men's fashion category by simply asking for reviews via a personalized video rather than pinging out one of those automated post purchase emails that we're all probably so familiar with. Or what about personally requesting a case study from a happy customer rather than just spamming out 50 emails to a bunch of your custom and crossing your fingers and hoping A good case study can be the lifeblood of your sales process. So surely it's worth taking 30 or 60 seconds to record a video that might land you a really great case study from a customer. Remember, when recording these videos, this is your opportunity to take your customers experience to the next level and your chance to let them know that they're not just another number to you and your business. So make sure you call them out by name. You've got to do that. Use their name. You know, we just Talked about the RAFs, the reticular activating System and why that's so important. Let them know why their support is so impactful to your business and maybe add a personal touch. Whether that's bringing your cat or your toddler into the video or showing them something goofy going on in the background as you're walking and recording your video. This adds a humanness and an openness that deepens the impact of your message and and obviously using their name and doing kooky things or just being a bit more real and human. That's all about activating that RAS system and getting access to their conscious brain. So just be human with your messages and you won't go wrong. Okay, we're almost there. The final part of your video funnel engine Loyalty funnels. So besides making more sales and driving, activation video is an ideal avenue to add value to your customer support experience. You can quickly use video to respond to a customer issue that maybe would have taken you half an hour to write out a response to. Or you can use it to invite new customers to join your company's communities on social media or in real life. Imagine that getting a personal invite to join your favorite company's Facebook community, or getting an invite to a local meetup from the person actually running it. How much more likely would you be to turn up all about using video to celebrate with customers as they hit important milestones with your business. This could be anything from being with you for 12 months to crossing some usage based threshold with your software. Don't leave them in the cold and let them know personally that you care about their dedication to your cause. Again, just like with all the applications we've discussed, video is no longer just the domain of marketing. It's not just about video hosting anymore. That's a slightly outmoded term, I think. Now this is about building a personal connection with your customer base at key moments in their journey with your business. So go beyond video hosting. Think about personal video this is what video funnels is all about. It sounds technical, but really it's just about relationships and connections. This should run right through your business, taking in everyone from sales to customer success. In short, anyone with a stake in connecting with and building relationships with your customers. So we've talked about a handful of video funnels now. Specific ways that you can leverage personalized video to increase sales, conversions and customer engagement. But what about if you don't? What if you walk away from this episode and figure out this video thing? Sounds cool, but it all seems way too time intensive for me. Look, the world of email in 2020 and beyond is changing. According to data from ReturnPath, the rates of emails landing in spam or promotional folders is continuing to rise steadily. Inboxes are smart and getting better and better at filtering out mass messaging. If you want to stay relevant with your prospects and your customers in 2020, you need to get personal, get targeted, and stand out at the end of the day. Whether it's video, emails, a handwritten note, or something else entirely. Dare to be different from everyone else. Dare to buck the modern trend of automate everything. Dare to put authenticity and kindness and being real at the front of your business strategy. Do that and the market will reward you.

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And the best part? They accept Discover. Except Discover in a little place like this? I don't think so. Jennifer oh yeah, huh? Discover's accepted where I like to shop. Come on baby, get with the times. Right? So we shouldn't get the parachute pants. These are making a comeback, I think. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. What a great, great lesson by Olie Bridge if you want to get started with your video funnel, Ollie's been generous enough to give us his Video Funnel Playbook that you can just use step by step. Just go to Bonjoro. That's B O n j o r-o.com video funnel playbook. No emails required. No opt in. It's just ungated there for you as a special gift. So take action with what you learned today in today's lesson. This idea of closing deals, getting people over the line from non customer to customer with a video message. I've done this before. It works so well. It just reminds me I got to keep doing this. I haven't done it in a while. If you're trying to get the attention of somebody in your marketplace, even maybe a mentor or somebody you maybe want to have as an advisor in the future, instead of cold emailing them with a long winded email, send them a quick video. It'll help you stand out. It'll help you also express your enthusiasm and your excitement to work with this person. I use video all the time. Even within the team. I always love sending video messages, whether to explain a complicated situation or do a screencast or maybe just, you know, brighten somebody's day with a happy birthday message. Video is very powerful and it's so easy to do. We have great video cameras on our phones and we have great cameras on our laptops and computers. So simple. And again, it's something different. It beats emojis any day. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. By hitting subscribe you get the next episode as soon as it's published right on your device. Also by hitting subscribe you get access to over 1500 business lessons in our archives. It's the only way to get access. So go ahead and hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The thing I learned over the years about marketing is you got to constantly try new things. Things that used to work back in the day don't work anymore. Back in the day, direct mail used to work. Now people get annoyed by direct mail. Back in the day, we didn't even get that many emails. So when we got an email, we read it. Now we can't stand our inbox. You get the point. You have to keep innovating and trying new things to get the attention of of your audience. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Okay.

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