Copy My Video Strategy To Find Warm Leads In Your Email List

This episode is presented by Evertrue. Set yourself up for higher retention rates all year long by joining my free webinar with Evertrue on January 16th. RSVP at positiveequation.com/thanks.

Today's episode is a little sneak behind the feed of my own personal thank you strategy using ThankView, a versatile video platform that goes way beyond just thanking donors.

I'll share how I used it to send a breezy 5-minute video to my email list that had a 44.7% open rate (more than double the industry average!) and the myriad of other possibilities with this tool, from choosing a template, adding recipients, perfecting the email message, and customizing a landing page.

Learn about the metrics that matter and industry averages for open rates and clicks, highlighting the significance of a compelling call to action. And as a bonus, you'll get my personal insights and takeaways from a successful campaign for my monthly giving mastermind program.

We'll also shine a spotlight on Pledgemind and EverTrue Studios, who offer free on-demand documentaries and podcasts for nonprofit professionals. And trust me, you won't want to miss out on my upcoming webinar with EverTrue on January 16th - you'll learn how to creatively use video campaigns, email, and direct mail to reengage your supporters! RSVP at positiveequation.com/thanks.

Resources & Links

Check out Episode 101: How To Scale Personalized Video Thank Yous with JD from EverTrue for more on this topic!

EverTrue Studios is like Netflix for fundraisers. Check out their catalog of on-demand documentaries and podcast episodes here.

Join my free webinar with EverTrue on January 16th to learn how to creatively use video campaigns, email, and direct mail to reengage your supporters! RSVP and start the New Year with me at positiveequation.com/thanks.

I’m hiring a Brand Partnerships Manager! Learn more here.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:37

I created my Thinkview campaign, the video, which was about five minutes long just less than five minutes long sent it out, uploaded my email list the whole thing in less than an hour. So super, super, super easy to do, and I wanted to essentially like kind of walk you step-by-step through the process of what I did and then share the results with you and how you can make me copy this into your own personal strategy. I'm the state. I'm the state. I'm the town. Hey, there you're listening to the Missions to Movement's podcast and I'm your host, dana Snyner, digital Strategist for Non-Profits and Founder and CEO of Positive Equations. This show highlights the digital strategies of organizations making a positive impact in the world. Ready to learn the latest trends, actionable tips and the real stories from behind the feed. Let's transform your mission into a movement. Hello and happy holidays. As I clicked record on today's podcast, I just wanted to share with you how much of an honor it is that I get to pop in and share this time with you, and I just want to say I appreciate you so much. This is episode 104, which blows my mind. I'll be coming up on the two year anniversary of the podcast in March, which is also crazy. I have to do something cool for that. But I just wanted to say thank you, as we're rounding out the year and I've been doing a lot of thank you related episodes and today is a little bit of a sneak behind the feed of what I like to say of this show, of my own personal strategy. So recently, if you listened to episode 101, I had JDBB from Ever True on. He is the president at Ever True and then he is also the co-founder and CEO of a product called ThankView, which is now rolled under the Ever True suite of products for nonprofits. And ThankView specifically if you listened to episode 101, is designed to share video thank yous to supporters after they give. But it's really so much more than that and that's where this episode dives into and I wanted to share specifically how I just used it and really had some compelling insights. So I am obviously not a nonprofit organization. I work with you but I love to test out different tools when I have the ability to do so, and especially anything that's in the marketing wheelhouse, because I learn, and the more that I learn, the more I can hopefully share with you and give you some ideas. So in this episode I wanted to share with you a strategy that you can take in Mimic utilizing ThinkView, a video platform, and it doesn't necessarily have to be around a thank you for donations. There's lots of different ways and reasons related to send a video. Note right, and so I created my ThinkView campaign, the video, which was about five minutes long just less than five minutes long sent it out, uploaded my email list the whole thing in less than an hour. So super, super, super easy to do and I wanted to essentially like kind of walk you step by step through the process of what I did and then share the results with you and how you can make me copy this into your own personal strategy. Also, before we start you might have heard this at the beginning If you want an actual visual look behind the scenes of the platform, I am going to be hosting a webinar with the Aperture team. Get your January calendars ready. It's going to be on January 16th at 2 pm and it's all about the one day approach to re-engage your supporters, how to creatively use email and direct mail together. It's going to be pretty exciting. We're going to have some live hot seats. If you RSVP before the end of the year, your name will be thrown into that hat and you can sign up for free at positiveequationcom backslash thanks to see kind of the back end of thank you. And then also my recent episode with Pledge Mind, which is direct mail platform with Lauren Daly. Also, an ever true product is going to be featured in that webinar as well. So hopefully you can join Dennis from their team and myself, as I think we're going to have a lot of fun to kick off the new year together. Have you ever had a brainstorm slump where you just need somewhere to go for new ideas? Now, yes, this podcast is for sure one. But I wanted to introduce you to ever true studios. It's basically like Netflix, but for fundraisers. Their platform offers free on-demand documentaries, series and over 250 podcast episodes tailored for advancement professionals, like raise and talking shop. You can subscribe at ever truecom backslash studios to start binging and you can click the link in the show. Knows, again, that's ever truecom backslash studios. And since you're a podcast fan, I just wanted to highlight you can go on Spotify or Apple to find these shows. Right now, raise podcast, hosted by the ever true CEO, who's really talking about the most exciting things and fundraising from a completely different angle. That is what the raise podcast is all about, and talking shop is hosted by. David lively is the senior associate vice president for alumni relations and development and campaign manager at Northwestern University, and Aaron Moran, director of commercial enablement at ever true and the former associate VP and chief of staff at DePaul University. So, basically, what happens when an advancement operations nerd and a big ideas major gift guys sit down to chat? They talk shop. So raise podcast and talking shop go check those out, go ahead and you can visit all of these documentaries and content at ever truecom backslash studios. Now back to the show. So let me dive into the platform of thank you and let me share with you what I did. So here's the premise. The context was my monthly giving mastermind program is the next launch group. We'll start in February, and so right now I am at the time where I am looking for five organizations that want to build out their monthly giving programs and we will help them do that in February, and so I want to get an understanding from my list of who's like a warm lead, who's really interested in participating in the program, who has interest in it, who might have further questions. They're tinkering on the website. They're watching certain things that maybe they just haven't reached out yet, and so I want to have a deeper conversation with those people to understand their needs and their goals. So I decided I always like to do things of value to put together a video sharing how to find 10 monthly donors right now within your existing supporter base. So that was my video. When you open up Thinkview, they have lots of different templates. You can send birthday videos, anniversary videos, you can send a request for videos, you can send thank you for donations. There's lots of different ones. I selected Other and, as I went through the process, it's very step by step. So the first thing that you want to do is you select that kind of context for what your campaign is going to be. Then you add your recipients very easy, uploaded my CSV file. Then you get to put together your message, which is the email setup that is going to be sent out to your recipients, and the video will be shown in the body of the email. Either you can have a little envelope. That's like somebody gets to click the envelope to open it and then view your video. You can share a thumbnail video or an animated thumbnail like a GIF and that's what I chose. You pick your subject line, your sender name, your reply email and then you can select even the font for the body of your email. And I had. Mine was very short and I just said hey, there have five minutes, question mark, smiley face. And then I had my message saying I put together a quick video for you, sharing a three-step process to get 10 new monthly donors right now from your existing audience. And my button said ooh and I say it like that because it literally made the O's go ooh, tell me more. And everything was branded in my colors. I could upload my logo and then the video was down below and it says watch your video. So it happens when somebody clicks watch your video, or the button is there's this branded landing page that you can create. And what I did was I just quickly went into Canva and I created this gradient of my brand colors and did that as the background, but you could upload photos and make it really fun and creative on your own. I kept mine pretty simple with the color gradient and I added a button as my attachment below my video, which was monthly, giving mastermind info, and people could click that. You could have a PDF. You can actually embed a form right on this page, which is pretty cool. Mine linked out to my mastermind and then you can have text below the video. So what I decided to do in mine because it was nearly, it was four minutes and 55 seconds I did chapters, so I said recap and then I outlined essentially at what time stamps what things I was talking about, and then I give a little bit of context about the program and I say click the button for all the details to apply, and my recipients had the ability to reply with a video recording, reply with an email, and they could also save the video. All of that was put together. Then the actual concept of putting together the video is also very easy. Something that I think is really cool. They offer the ability to have intro themes and outro themes, so you can do those separately and you can essentially like build your video together instead of having to have that Pre-edited. You could select that before and after, or you can just have your recording and you can either upload your recording, which is what I did, or you can Physically just record it using your webcam on your computer. So once you have that all message together. Then you can preview that sequence. You can send it a test email out to yourself, which I did a couple of times to make sure everything looked okay, and then you can either schedule everything to go out right then in the moment, or you can pick a time at a future date for it to go out, and then you'll be able to see any of the replies, if there was something that you were kind of asking for a reply with. So that's, in a nutshell, the process that I went through to create my campaign, and On the dashboard it gives you a breakdown of metrics and you can click into them further. Hey, I hope you are enjoying this episode. I wanted to give you a quick announcement. The next round of my monthly giving mastermind will start in February. Previously it was mid-January, but as I'm going through 2024 planning, I really want to give us all time to get settled into the new year. So the monthly giving mastermind will start in February for five organizations max. So if building a monthly donor program has been on your to-do list, that it keeps getting pushed back due to limited time or resources, this is for you. By April, you will have a program that is ready to go live. So let's make it happen together. You can head to positive equation dot-com back slash mastermind to learn all about it, to apply to view more details and to view our work with featured alumni of the program. Again, that's positive equation dot-com backslash mastermind. So something else that I really like about the performance overview screen that I'm looking at as I'm telling you this is Underneath your stats. It gives you an industry average. So I am obviously not the industry for this, but it was interesting for me to see. So, for Open rates, the industry average says it's 21.3 percent, mine was 44.7. That that was really interesting. And then clicked, the industry average is 2.63 percent and mine was 6.6 percent, but that was also interesting. It gives me the amount that was delivered, how many bounced most of my, 94 percent of mine Delivered, which is pretty good. And then it gives you and this is the meat and potatoes that I wanted to share with you those numbers are great, right. However, what I really wanted to focus on was I only have five people in this mastermind at the time because it is very personalized and With any very short within three months. We're getting a monthly giving program live, so we want to be able to have a lot of personalization with people. So the next stats that it shares is all about the video I started watching, finished watching, total views, average view and call to action clicks. So the average view of my video was 50%. So this is good for me to know, even for future reference. So roughly that Two and a half minute mark people were watching too, and then call to action clicks and you can click into each of these stats and you can see the emails and the names of who those people were. So Today what I did was I went through anybody who Clicked on the call to action clicks and actually something else I might do is go into the finished watching list when I have some time and I sent personalized emails to everyone that clicked on the button. So in your case, let's say you are sending out an email and the button is asking somebody to make a donation, there's probably going to be more people clicking the button than actually make gifts, right? So you'd want to do a cross check of people who actually donate it. But for those that didn't, you could personally reach out and say hey, saw you were interested. X, y and z message, right, but you're able to significantly filter down and find the warm leads of people who had the intent. They clicked the button, they finished watching the video and you can lead them to that next step. We are all very, very busy people, so and I talked about this on a webinar recently where I need to see something seven, eight times to take an action between watching Kennedy, who is eight months old now and I swear she's going to walk any day, which blows my mind she wants to pull up on everything. So constantly watching her taking care of, like, my business and family, getting things ready for the holidays like things are crazy, right, just life happens, and so this is a way where you can take that extra personalized step by filtering down into this warm list somebody to reach out to. Other things I'll just quickly note on here you can see location metrics of who is your most engaged audience views by device engagement scores, average engagement by age, age breakdown, so I thought this was pretty interesting. There are a plethora of more features in here, including SMS messaging, which is also very cool, but I just wanted to share this quick strategy with you and I hope it's helpful. There's so many ways that you could think about using this for anybody who does have a monthly donor program, sending a video just to say happy anniversary for six months of giving and ask them to reply back to you saying why do you love this program. I think there's so many creative ways to utilize video to make a really personalized connection with people, so I hope this was helpful. Again, if you are interested in learning more or even just jumping on a demo with the team I think JD graciously he did, he graciously shared his email address with us in the previous episode Reach out to JD. It's just JD at ever truecom. Of course you can just go to think view on their website as well or ever true. And again, I would love to share with you the free webinar with EverTru's team on January 16th of really how to use video campaigns, email and direct mail to reengage your supporters right at the beginning of the year. So RSVP, start the new year with me. It is a great way to be sending out these video emails, a great way to just stay top of mind with your supporters. I know it feels like oh my gosh, we're doing so much at end of year, like do they really want to hear from us again? Yeah, yes, yes. So we're going to talk strategically about how to make that happen. Again, you can RSVP at positivequationcom. Backslash. Thanks and y'all. This is. I think there's one more episode that I'm going to share with you this year, and then it's going to be 2024. I'm going to take a brief break during the holidays to spend time with some family, and I am just I'm going to say this in the other episode too but I am wishing you the most joyful, healthy, happy holiday season and I am so, so, so grateful for you If you have enjoyed listening to this episode and episodes throughout the year. If you can, please leave a review on the podcast on Apple Spotify, wherever you listen. I would be forever grateful to you. I promise I read every single one and thank you so much for listening. Can you tell I love talking all things digital to make this show better? I'd be so grateful for your feedback. Leave a review, take a screenshot of this episode, share it on Instagram stories and tag positive equation with one E so I can reshare and connect with you.