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14 Comments

🚀 How to send 1000 personalised videos per week

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post on IndieHackers. I have been reading a lot on here and now it's my time to give.

I'm not an IndieHacker to be honest. Not even close... but I have been reading a few sections in which you wizards have difficulties doing sales. The last year my life has been about sales (especially sales automation).

So this one is for all wizards out there. Let me show you my book of spells!

I started learning about doing sales a year ago, when me and my co-founders decided to build a marketplace to connect startups with interns in The Netherlands.

We thought it would be a good idea if I were in charge of sales, as nobody else wanted to do it. At university they don't teach you anything about sales so I read/listened to every ebook, blog or podcast out there.

Basically all were pointing to the fact that you have to be different than the other 99% in order to stand out. So we started researching how we could stand out...

Now one year in, we have automated our sales process and sending 1000 emails per week with a personalized video, which looks like this: (text is in Dutch)

Personalized video for Jorn

This image is from the first email we send to our prospects (our sequence only sends two emails). It's a photo of me with a link to a YouTube video embedded on a landing page.

The picture in the upper left corner is the logo of the company, which is automatically generated by the domain name of the person I'm sending the email to. The same happens for the name on the whiteboard, it's the prospects first name. It's generated by using the "FirstName" tag, which belongs to the prospect.

The copy of the email above the video is pretty straightforward and focuses on the problem we are solving:

"I had difficulties with finding a cool internship myself. As a student you are only aware of the big corporates, but there are 10.000+ other companies out there you have never heard off... And to be honest... I wouldn't have found {CompanyName} either..."

This is what we are fixing!

The results above are from sending a sequence consisting of two emails. In addition we are sending everyone who 'opened' the email, but didn't 'reply' an automated LinkedIn message, which even increases our total reply rate.

Let me know if you want to know more about our process. I'm willing to do a sequence of posts here on indie hackers about how our whole process looks like.

Topics:

  • Tools
  • Copy
  • Automation: How to build guide!
  • Omnichannel outreach (LinkedIn & facebook groups)

Is this valuable for you?

  1. 3

    I like this approach. Reminds me of @NeilC's "best cold email ever":

    https://ramptshirts.com/blog/2018/01/12/wrote-sent-best-cold-email-ever/

    Am I right in thinking you generated a unique thumbnail for each lead, but the video it linked to was generic?

    1. 2

      Thanks for the mention, Jaymie! We had a lot of fun with that campaign, as you can see from a lot of the responses.

      I had a similar approach to the @ironbrands one a while back, and the thumbnail was personalised, but the video was generic.

      Having said that, I've also had personalised videos, too. I think if you have a really targeted list then it's worth spending 30 secs of recording (plus a few mins of relevant CRM admin) per target client.

      1. 1

        Very cool how you pulled this off yourself. I basically used Lemlist (email automation tool) to do the hard work for me. You could have built your own email automation tool haha

        I agree with you that personalised videos would be even better. We are doing this already with "warmer" leads, who have been in our funnel for a while. Although, our service is a marketplace service and we need to scale one side of the market rather fast. So this is working awesome for us.

        1. 2

          Cool! I got to know Guillaume from Lemlist very early on, as we were building this at the same time he was launching. He's a really nice guy.

          Yeah, personalised videos would be amazing at scale. I suppose that's where deepfakes come in... ;-)

    2. 1

      Thanks Jaymie. I check out @NeilC's blog post. Awesome read! The thumbnail is indeed unique for each lead and the video is a generic one. Neil's team pulled it off themselves, I used Lemlist, they have a feature like this.

  2. 1

    Automation please

  3. 1

    "In addition we are sending everyone who 'opened' the email, but didn't 'reply' an automated LinkedIn message, which even increases our total reply rate."

    Iron what you meant by sending a LinkedIn Message
    do you get your leads (emails) from LinkedIn in the first place ?
    were they paid leads ?

    1. 1

      Yeah we get our lead from Linkedin in the firstplace. And no we have never worked with paid leads.

  4. 1

    Hey @IronBrands, I remember you sending me one a while ago. It was pretty neat and looked real to me.

    Might not be valuable for what I do, but I believe there will be quite a lot of Indiehackers who would dig this kind of thing.

    1. 1

      @BraydenTW haha thats cool to hear. Thanks! I hope there will be a few folks around here, who find this valuable and might have some feedback.

      1. 1

        Well, best of wishes!

  5. 1

    Hey, this is really cool. Would love to hear more about copywriting and how you gather leads.

    1. 2

      Thanks! My first response, awesome! Will write about these topics in a few days. Lets keep in touch, would love to help out if you have specific questions.

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