I’m really excited to have Casey Hill here today. He is on the team at Bonjoro. He is the Head of Growth. He is sitting over sales and marketing. The reason why I wanted to have Casey on this podcast today was to really talk about how you can use video to add high touch moments to your customer journey.
I am a huge, huge Bonjoro fan. We use Bonjoro in our business in lots of different ways. I really wanted Casey to come on and share his genius, and what they’re doing over at Bonjoro because I think it’s going to make a really big difference in a lot of business owners’ lives. Welcome, Casey.
Casey Hill: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to chat about this topic with you.
Tara Newman: It’s funny. I started using Bonjoro, I stopped using Bonjoro, and I started using Bonjoro again.
Casey Hill: That’s funny. Actually, before I came to work for Bonjoro, I actually used Bonjoro for a year and a half. I was sales manager for an inbound marketing company called Ontraport and I actually used it. I was a user of Bonjoro before I came to Bonjoro. It was my arc with it. That was a cool way. When I joined Bonjoro, I knew it really, really well because I’ve been using it for a while.
Tara Newman: I love Bonjoro so much. I could totally see that happening to me. I’m just going to shut my business down and just go work for Bonjoro. I want to share this because I don’t know, maybe there are people out there who have tried Bonjoro. How long have you guys been on the market?
Casey Hill: We started in 2017, so we’ve been around for about four years now.
Tara Newman: Perfect. I think I started using it in 2018. You were really new. I think the whole concept in general was new. I started using it and I think I stopped using it because just my own stuff, like I was a little uncomfortable on video at the time. I was not 100% sure how it really fit into my business because it’s a tool, so we have to have a clear process in order to know where tools fit. I needed to really go back and figure out my process, then I was able to come back and plunk Bonjoro in as a tool. Some of the greatest benefits that I’ve seen to using Bonjoro, I just want to talk about this, we’re chatting about this before we started, is a lot of the women that I work with are in this complicated relationship with social media and video on social media. I’m not a huge lover of social media.
I like stories on Instagram but I’m not a Reels person, I’m not a Facebook Live person. Really what Bonjoro has allowed me to do is add very high-touch video moments on my customer journey without having to go and learn Reels or use video in ways that don’t feel in integrity or aligned with my values. For those reasons, I really love Bonjoro. Let’s jump in and talk about why. Why is this so important right now?
Casey Hill: For sure. I think that when you look at the current landscape of business, we’ve seen a huge surge in automation, we’ve seen a huge surge in small businesses are now learning, like, “Hey, I need to have a newsletter” or “Hey, I need to have this thing.” I’ll be careful too when I say need because I feel like a lot of people say that people need things that aren’t necessarily fundamental, just like the social media stuff you’re talking about, “Oh, you need to have a presence on X, Y, and Z.” But I think fundamentally, there’s a lot of noise, is the high level of conversation.
There’s a lot of noise in the market. If you’re looking to be differentiated, if you’re looking to be able to try to really stand out from the hundreds of other providers that are doing comparable things, then I think you need to figure out a way to create relationships. Relationships are harder and harder, especially if you’re an online business, that can be really challenging but even in person, we saw with the pandemic and how that threw everything up in the air, and people were forced to do things virtually. There’s this huge space right now and huge opportunity for businesses that are able to create genuine relationships with prospects to drive more sales or with customers to drive more advocacy, and retention. I think there’s a huge market opportunity. That’s where things like video or other means of personalization can be incredibly valuable.
Tara Newman: I think you’re hitting the nail right on the head. First of all, if you have a business, your business doesn’t exist if you don’t have sales. That’s just it. Casey is the Head of Growth. He oversees sales and marketing. I’m a business growth coach. I teach sales primarily. You don’t have a business unless you have sales coming in. How do you get sales coming in? No sale happens outside of a relationship. I think that’s what people forget. Especially if they’re either head down in the business, working on it and not paying attention to building those relationships or they’re using online tools where they think, “Oh, people are just going to click on a link and buy.” That’s not happening so much. It’s relationship based.
Casey Hill: I think what happens is a lot of people are like, “Okay, I need to drive traffic for my business.” Where do they go? They go to Facebook ads. They start putting budget in, they start running Facebook ads, you get a bunch of people there, bunch of leads that are getting generated but they often see a very small portion of them converting into sales. A good example, and obviously, depending on what type of business, the levers that we use to drive traffic and leads are always different but webinars are an example. Webinars have become popular. People say, “I want to invite a bunch of people to talk more about what I do.” By and large, we see that it works like this. Someone drives ads or they have some promotion technique. They get 200 people registered, then 40 of those people show up, then an even smaller percentage, obviously, actually converts. There’s this huge falloff effect that happens.
That is the type of thing where if you were able to have a conversation with one of those people that registered, if you’re able to sit down and chat with them, and you’re able to say, “Hey, what are you really struggling with? Why are you coming here? What are you really fundamentally interested in?” Of course, a massively higher percentage of those people would actually show up to that webinar. Similarly, if you were able to sit down and have a personal conversation with every single person who attended, much more of them would convert and ultimately become customers.
The idea is if we’re not able to actually sit down in person, because we live in a global world and people are spread out, and so on and so forth, what are the ways that we can start working towards, trying to really put our face in front of people and try to have as much of a conversation as we can, even if it’s asynchronous with those individuals to start to cultivate that relationship? I think that’s where you can start to see, “Hey, if I can make this webinar lever 20% more efficient, that can have a big downstream impact.” I did a case study with a company called CXL. They basically run courses for marketers and that was one of the levers they used. They were like, “Hey, if we can make this webinar flow much more efficient, we can sell more of our premium services.” Because they sell a premium course offering, so that was a very powerful pipeline. They could increase that traffic by 20%. Downstream sales go way up. That could be really powerful.
Tara Newman: I think that there are lots of different ways. What I loved about our conversation, and actually, before we started rolling this podcast, you were saying you come from a background where you’ve worked in automation. We’re talking about something that’s very high touch in a world that’s obsessed with automation, yet Bonjoro does such a nice job at creating workflows, maybe not automation but workflows to make doing the high-touch parts easier.
Casey Hill: Yeah, 100%. This was really important to us. When we came in, we weren’t the first video player on the market. When we saw a video and we’re like, “Hey, Vimeo is this great tool,” but as it stood when we walked into the market, it was very time intensive. There’s a lot of steps. It’s like you record your video, then you paste it into the email. There’s a lot of things that are happening, so we realized that anytime you have a lot of steps to resistance, you’re going to get less and less people that adopt it.
We said, “Look, a lot of times, there may be things in someone’s business that they want to optimize.” “I’m getting a lot of leads but I’m not converting them” or “I’m getting a lot of customers that come on board initially but then they fall off or they stop.” They don’t leave reviews or they don’t do XYZ. Bonjoro walked in and we said, “Look, we’ll connect in with your CRM system, your email automation tool so that when a certain behavior happens, like someone opts in on a form, we’ll give you all that information that the person filled out. You can interact with that person right away. We’ll set up a template, pre-packaged, so you don’t need to write the subject line every time, you don’t need to write the preview text, all these things that are required. All you have to do is literally click, see the context, record.” To us, that was the best of both worlds where you’re still able to use the systems. We’re working with your systems but the actual process of doing the video itself becomes much simpler and becomes much quicker. That’s what we wanted to accomplish.
Tara Newman: I think you really reduced some of the barriers to entry around that. There is absolutely nothing easier than sending a Bonjoro video. I can do a Bonjoro video in probably 40 seconds. Even if I were to send 10, 20 a day, that’s just 20 minutes of my time that I’m spending, interacting with people that I care about. I care that people get the support they need in their business. I care that they get their questions answered. I care that they’ve enrolled in a program of mine. It makes it very easy. The more you do it, the easier it becomes.
Casey Hill: I think too, that’s a signal, like when you take time out of your day to do something for people in your community, they see that transparency but also, they have that increased connection. One of the things that’s so important, I talk a lot about customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value. We’re in a world today where you can’t just focus on things like, “I spent X and I got X,” because it’s so much more than that but I think what people miss a lot of times when we talk about customer lifetime value is they don’t talk enough about the advocacy part also afterwards. It’s all about the direct spend but if you have customers in your community who sing your praises, they post value, they leave glowing reviews, they tell their friends, we live in a market today that’s driven by referrals, that’s driven by customer proof. When we go to buy things, how often do we look at reviews before we buy a big purchase? Almost always. If you can get more of your people in your community to be advocates, I think that’s a profound growth lever that you have. People listen to that. If they hear it from a third party, that’s so much more compelling than your own, telling them, “We’re the best.” I think that’s a really powerful thing.
Tara Newman: It’s really sometimes stunning to me how many problems you have managed to solve in the Bonjoro tool in the sense that I’m a Profit First Certified Consultant, so for me, not all revenue is created the same. There’s definitely more profitable revenue than other revenue. Some of our most profitable revenue come from referrals, come from when we can reactivate a past client, come from when we can re-enroll or increase that actual lifetime value of a customer because once you’ve paid to obtain them, keeping them, that’s the whole point of having measuring that average lifetime value of a customer. The way Bonjoro does this is so fascinating to me. Can we talk about some examples of how that worked? Because one, I was just checking out some of the case studies that you have and I found my favorite one. I hope when I mention it, you know which one I’m talking about but it was the camp in Washington. For those business owners out there who are like, “How do I get more referrals?” I want Casey to share a little bit about this case study if he can.
Casey Hill: Totally. What she’s referencing, guys, is a YMCA Camp director. What he would do is when someone basically purchased a ticket for the camp, he would do a personal welcome to the parents. It was a kids camp. Personal welcome just to show them in the actual video, he would be in their living quarters and they were always themed, like Harry Potter themed or global world themes. They were always fun looking. He would record these videos and basically just say, “Hey, here’s what to expect,” and just give them a low down of the overall experience they were going to get into. People were so excited about this experience that they started telling everyone else. The gentleman, Tim, was looking at his computer and he was starting to see all of these sign-ups that were coming from a random out-of-state place. He was really confused because obviously, camps are localized. He’s like, “Where is all this coming from?”
Tara Newman: He’s in Washington and he’s seeing tens of thousands of dollars coming in from Oregon.
Casey Hill: Exactly. Just dozens of kids, dozens of kids are basically coming in. It turns out it was all from referrals. It all came from word of mouth where someone was so amazed that they told someone else and pretty soon, a whole group got on board and was like, “We need to do this.” I think that is the power of advocacy. That’s the power of having someone else be your trumpeter that’s spreading the word about you. That’s a really fun one. Tim, the guy who records that, is an awesome guy.
Tara Newman: So good. I think sometimes, what we forget to do as business owners is put ourselves in our customers’ position. I think we forget to think about things through the buyer’s lens. Here is this camp director and as you pay this man—and camp costs a good chunk of money for families, I know, I send my kids to camp—they pay him, then boom, they get a video of Tim, the camp director, letting them know that he’s received their payment—I don’t know what his video says but I’m just going to say they’ve received their payment—he’s so excited to be welcoming their children to his camp. He’s like, “Look, here’s some of the living quarters. Let me give you a little bit of a tour around camp. Listen, we can’t wait to see you. We’re going to have so much fun this summer.” Maybe he gives what the next step is for them to take. Now, you’re a family. You’ve just spent all this money. Of course, there’s a little concern you’re probably sending your kids to camp, especially if you’re sending them for the first time but as a parent, you’re always a little nervous, and you get this video from this friendly person, he’s showing you around, that’s the best. Then you’re excited. You probably show your kid the video, you’re showing your friends the video, “Look what I just got from this place. It’s amazing.” People are probably posting about this like, “We just had this amazing customer experience.” When people have good customer experiences, they share that. They share that with other people.
Casey Hill: 100%. I think one of the things you hit on too, which is so valuable, is just this concept of trust. In his case, it’s really obvious. You’re sending your kids somewhere. In the case study, he actually even talked about this, a good chunk about how important it is to build that trust with parents. Some of these people, the first time sending their kid for camp, it’s scary, so seeing a human face and seeing him talk, that immediately puts them at ease. The larger conversation though is that trust is paramount to any type of business. Whether you’re a coach or a consultant or you’re in person, there’s always this trust aspect, “Why you?”
The reality is that large organizations sometimes have, like if you go to whatever brand comes to mind but if you go to a certain large establishment, they already know stuff about that establishment but if you’re a small player, you have to build that trust. You have to be the one to create it. There’s less customer proof. There’s less noise. I think that’s what makes it that much more compelling for you to show up in person. They can see you. They can see how you talk. Very quickly, someone is going to make an assessment but like, “Oh, that seems like a friendly person. That seems like the person I could trust. That seems like the person that’s going to be candid and forthcoming. They’re not going to sugarcoat it. They’re going to tell me how it is.” If it’s a business coach you’re going to assess, “Is this a flowery type of person or is this someone who’s really going to get down to brass tacks and help me solve problems?” I think that trust component is such a big part of the value of personalization.
Tara Newman: I think it actually works both ways too, at least from my perspective, because as a service provider, you’re most likely having a more intimate relationship with somebody than maybe even if you’re selling a product. I always really enjoy when people respond to my Bonjoros because they like them or whatever because I’m like, “Oh, they’re somebody who wants to engage in building a relationship with me. They appreciate that I just took the time out of my day because I care to connect with them.” That always sends me a message too because just as much as people are maybe vetting me, I’m vetting my clients.
Casey Hill: Sure. Of course, it’s always a two-way street. You want there to be a good compatibility and fit. I know for me, personally, probably one of my favorite things about Bonjoro is the responses of just people getting excited and saying, “I’ve never gotten one of these. What the heck.” They’re just so surprised because it’s such a novel thing in the market today that people are blown away that someone would do that. I think that’s where it makes it fun. Especially as a business, if you have any connection to people who run say a course, people that buy in often know the course creator. That’s one of the reasons that they buy in. When there’s some connection where they know you personally when they buy in, it makes it that much more special because the person’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy, so-and-so is sending me a message.”
Tara Newman: I think that Bonjoro helps you make sales. We’ve given an example of how it’s helped get referrals. I can certainly share my own personal examples but do you have an example of how people use this and it positively impacts their sales process, meaning they’ve converted more sales? I know this because it happened to me.
Casey Hill: For sure, I got lots. I’ll start with actually how I use Bonjoro myself, which was in a sales application before I even came to work for Bonjoro. I used Bonjoro for over a year before I even came to Bonjoro. I worked for an email marketing company. I was a sales manager. We had a problem with high no-shows. Only 60% of the people that booked calls to us actually showed up for our calls. We were doing all the normal things, we had calendar reminders on, we were even doing SMS reminders and couldn’t get people to freaking show up on these calls, so we were trying to understand, “Are they bad fit? What’s the fundamental problem?” Someone recommended Bonjoro. We plugged Bonjoro into our process. We started to send personal videos right after someone booked, just to put a human face to it. Now they weren’t no-showing to a random anonymous person. They were no-showing to me or Darren or Dan or all the people on our team. It cut no-shows in half, which was a huge downstream revenue impact for our organization. If you have probably 20% more people showing up, that leads to a lot more sales. That was one of the first ways that I saw a user in that process like, “This is awesome.”
Then I started using it around proposals. We were working with enterprise deals and things that gone quiet. We were looking at a way to get a conversation initiated again. We found that oftentimes, the automated drips that we send out like, “Have you checked my proposal?” Those were just going unanswered but when I was a human being, sitting down, referencing the conversation, talking about it in a way that was clearly sent and catered just for them, we got way more responses and we had way more people that were like, “Okay, let’s do this thing.” Shook to action. I think that when it comes to the sales side, there’s all the way from the top of the sales process to the bottom of the sales process but initially, it’s about creating interaction. It can even be off of an opt-in. When someone opts in for a lead magnet, that’s the beginning of your sales process. You send them a video and you start to create interaction right away. With Bonjoros, about six months ago, we launched something called Next Gen templates where you can embed anything below..
Tara Newman: I’m obsessed with those.
Casey Hill: That’s a great opportunity where we could put our calendar embedded right underneath and someone doesn’t even have to leave the page. They can just watch a video, go book right away or they can fill out a form or they can watch another video. There’s a ton of applications but that’s one of the things we see a lot of people doing, trying to drive more bookings from people that fall into the funnel, driving more bookings, which I think is awesome. I actually just got off, this one isn’t even published yet but I just chatted with a marketing agency called Joe Kern. A gentleman named Joe Kern who had a really cool use case. He basically put a form, so when people opted into his list, he asked them what their number one top marketing challenge was. It was on a type form. That was what he put right below the video but then on the right hand side, he also gave them the ability to book a call. What I thought was brilliant about giving both options in that application was that he was able to cast a wider net. The people who weren’t ready to hop on a call, he could still try to gather some information from them and continue to work with them but the people that were like, “I just want to talk to someone,” he gave them that option too. There’s a lot of fun things happening on the sales side.
Tara Newman: I think what’s really brilliant about that is a couple of things. We know that only approximately 15% of your leads are ready to buy from you right now but when you do have somebody who gets on a phone call with you, then they’re actually ready to buy is some of what the data says, especially if you’re doing a great job with your marketing. For me, by the time people get on a call with me, for the most part, they’re ready to buy. We have this podcast. I do a lot of high touch email. I am available on Instagram. We’re out there. We’re constantly and consistently marketing. When people do get on a call with me, they are ready to just make sure that I’m the person that I sound like on a podcast and stuff like that. They want to share some concerns they have with me, what have you.
It’s brilliant because it gives them the opportunity to, if they are that person and they are ready, just book the call right out of the gates. If you’re not ready, let’s build that relationship. That’s such a great use of that. Depending on the time and depending on my time, I do send a video when people sign up for our opt-in, which is our Revenue Goal Calculator. It comes with training there. I just want to make sure that people are using it, so I’m always like, “Hey, I just want to make sure, if you have any additional questions after watching that video, just feel free.”
I’m introducing myself. I’m building that relationship. I’m starting that connection because I have a very high touch sales process. That’s not the first time you’re going to hear from me but I also don’t want the first time you’re going to hear from me to be like maybe some direct sales outreach. I want you to know that I care about you and building this relationship, and the experience you have, whether you buy from me or not. That’s just how that fits with my values and how that fits with the culture that I’m creating here.
Casey Hill: I think it’s phenomenal. I also think another really powerful thing when someone first enters your ecosystem, if you can get them talking. One of my top recommendations for Bonjoro is to tell people to ask questions in their Bonjoro. Whether it’s trying to get someone to show up for a webinar, whether it’s a new lead or whether it’s a new customer, if you can ask questions and get someone communicating, they’re always going to be more engaged and more emotionally invested because now they’re sharing things about their situation, where they’re at. That is the start of the relationship. One of the things I always say is, “Look, a relationship by its nature, has to come with communication. No matter how good your marketing is, you can have the best marketing in the world but if you’re just sending to someone and there’s no back to you, that’s not a relationship.” That could be great marketing but it’s not a relationship. If you’re interested in a relationship, I think one of the keys here is to ask questions. Implore people to share. Implore people to communicate.
I won’t go down this rabbit hole but I also have a little bit of a background in postmaster and deliverability. That’s also a huge signal right now. If you want to avoid promotion folders, if you’re trying to land in primary inboxes, you need to get people to respond back to you because the inbox providers, they’re smart and they say, “Look, what is the number one most correlated factor between a personal correspondence or between marketing email?” They’ll look at terms and look at all the things but the number one most correlated factor is response rates because when you write to your friend or your parents or whoever else, the response rates are 70%, 80% whereas nobody has an 80% response rate to your email blast that went out to 5,000 people. That’s such a key factor. If you can get more people communicating, you actually help all the rest of your marketing activities too, so it becomes a positive snowball in your favor.
Tara Newman: The one thing that I’m not sure, especially with the businesses that I work with, these are credible experts, they’re they’re delivering services, I don’t think that we understand how people might be a little intimidated to approach us or to get on a call with us, especially depending on what service we’re providing or what we’re doing because that often means that this person needs to acknowledge that they have a problem that they need help solving, and that’s not always the easiest conversation to have. I have a podcast, so people might think I’m more popular or cool than I think than I really actually am. How do we continue to break down this barrier? I could see on my email list, if they’re interested in a program that we have or if they’re interested in working with me, I’ll outreach and just say, “Hey, I’m available to answer any questions that you might have. Please feel free to share your hesitations or concerns. We can go back and forth here or you can book a call with me.” I use the Next Gen form. That gives them a direct link to my Calendly, so they can book a call with me. It’s really just about encouraging people to come forward. I say there, I’m like, “Listen, there are no silly questions. We’re not always as clear as we want to be on a sales page, so feel free to ask those questions.” So many people respond with their questions. They’re like, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to reach out” or “I forgot” or “Thank you for prompting me” or “I felt awkward.” They really are responding to that level of connection.
Casey Hill: I think it’s authenticity, that’s what it is at a core level. You’re being authentic. You’re just getting your personality in front, taking down that barrier and acknowledging, “Hey, things might not have been perfectly clear on this page, if so, let me help you.” That level of transparency and authenticity resonates with people. This is one of the things I think is so cute with video because when people think about using video, they often get so intimidated. They’re like, “Oh, I’m not a video person. I can’t imagine myself doing a video.” Part of it is to separate the produced video from the personal video because they’re fundamentally different. When you have a produced video, it’s often what I call aspirational. You’re trying to create an image that people want to aspire to but when you’re talking about personal video, it’s completely different. It’s all about relatability.
If your kid runs into the clip of your video or some interruption happens, those videos often do the best. The reason is because they’re relatable because the person you’re sending the video to has the same hurdles, the same distractions, the same things that you’re dealing with. What you’re trying to do with a personal video is to say, “Hey, there’s a human on the other side of this.” I think that’s the beautiful part of it. The beautiful part of it is the barrier then becomes that much lower because you just need to hop on and you need to be authentic. When I coach people in teams through, I always say, “If you’re not a really chipper high energy person, you don’t need to do that in your video. Be you. If you’re introverted, then you can talk as you would normally talk.” People will be able to see that. Just follow your personality type and the person on the receiving end, their barrier will come down when they see, “Oh wow, that person is just being open.”
Tara Newman: First of all, those are my favorite videos to receive because they give me so much permission to just be myself. Those are my favorite videos to send. Typically, my Bonjoro, I may or may not be wearing makeup. I’m typically sitting out in my backyard, wrapping up my day because I’m just sitting down, taking a breather and thinking that feels like a good time or I’m shuttling my kids in the car between activities and I’m waiting for them to get out of an activity. The car is parked but I’m waiting for them to get out of an activity and I’ll just go again, less than a minute for a Bonjoro. I can be in mom mode and still be sending these Bonjoros from my phone, which is a sales activity that is going to make my business grow. It’s such an incredible win for me, especially since I really encourage people to sell every day, to start conversations every day and sell. If you want consistent and predictable income coming into your business, you need to be doing that every day. Bonjoro just makes it so easy to start a conversation and to connect with somebody, and to do that every day.
Casey Hill: That accessibility is really important. It’s one of the reasons we really leaned into the mobile application to let people do videos from wherever. Just like you, a lot of our top power users do their videos while they’re out walking or throughout doing things. I do my videos while not walking all the time. I want to share it quickly. Probably, my favorite use case if I’m allowed to have favorites is a company called the Wildebeest. Their use case talks about basically how they were able to take a very low-cost introductory product. The Wildebeest is basically an e-commerce company. He is an artist, him and his wife, and he does goofy, funny punny illustrations. That’s his brand. He does postcards but he also does original prints and higher level stuff as well.
Where he uses Bonjoro so masterfully and it’s been so cool to see how his business has grown, and they’re hiring people, that’s a separate thing but it’s been awesome, but basically, what he does is he uses videos to get that personality across. When someone buys a $3 card, he hops on and he has these goofy funny videos. We can share in the show notes. People can actually watch the videos themselves but his whole brand is built around that. He showcases that in a video. He’s had this huge surge of people that are so blown away that they go from that $3 purchase to $1,000 original print. There’s this huge upsell funnel. I think another thing is like when you’re able to build relationships, you also were able to take that small introductory point, then expand it into something much larger. That’s a story we’ve heard for a lot of people that they sell some individual, whether it’s a small course or it’s some small introductory product, then through relationships, they end up selling their one-to-one services or their high-end mastermind or insert X other thing. I think there’s incredible power there to be able to have that ability to asynchronously put yourself out there, let them consume it on their timetable but start that relationship.
Tara Newman: I think that everybody forgets about the post purchase point of the customer journey. I think they forget about two things, one, that post purchase point in the customer journey. They bought from you, now what? Then the second one is people buy from people. People don’t buy from funnels. People don’t buy from a social media graphic. They don’t technically buy from email. They buy from people. This person is showing you who he is, then people are like, “I want to buy from him. I want to support that small business. He’s a cool person. He’s got a creative vibe about him that I want more of.” That’s why that’s so important. We all have a post-purchase point of our cycle. When you can deliver what’s expected and deliver it better than somebody else, you create that customer loyalty that allows you to, instead of upselling, I call it up serving, to up-serve the people who you want to make a difference in their world and in their life. There’s lots of different ways that you can use that in the post-purchase phase.
For me, when they join my program, they get a video welcoming them in and giving them a couple of steps that they need to take to get stuck into our program. We continue to use video. I’ll sometimes send videos to people who I see showing up for our calls on a regular basis and thank them for their engagement, and their participation. My husband runs a manufacturing company where they’re manufacturing capital equipment. It’s a very long phase between purchase and delivery of this machine. He doesn’t use Bonjoro. I’m literally trying to get him to do that but what he sometimes does, just as an example to how you can use Bonjoro across even a manufacturing company, he’ll send videos and he’s like, “Hey, I’m out on the shop floor and I want to show you your machine being built. Here’s what it looks like. Here are the people who are building your machine. Thanks for buying American and giving them an opportunity to have employment,” or whatever he says but they love that. They love seeing the people who touch the product.
Casey Hill: 100%. That’s actually such a good connection. We’ve actually done several. One of them is a company called Munk Store. They became the number one, not athletic wear but basically some apparel in Denmark. They basically did it through whenever someone would buy from them, they would literally show, “Here’s the pair of shoes that you’re about to receive.” People were like, “What?” They’re blown away. Then the very first use case I ever did was a coffee shop called O-Joes. What O-Joes did is whenever you bought coffee from them, they were trying to move their one-time buyers to subscription buyers, which is another really cool use case by the way for anyone who’s in that situation. Basically, they would buy, you can go check out these videos on our case study, he would show the bag of coffee in the actual coffee machines and he’s like, “Hey, let me show you how we make this.” People couldn’t believe that. They couldn’t believe this person.
His videos were still only 30, 45 seconds long but it was like that 30 to 45 seconds where he would say, “Hey, Casey, let me show you how this Nicaraguan coffee that you’re about to receive is made.” It was so cool. People were like, “Okay, I’m never buying from anyone else because it was such a cool experience.” In his case, he was able to move a huge portion of his buyers. I think he added something insane, like $75,000 in monthly recurring revenue from transitioning one-time buyers to subscribers. It was mind-blowing. I think if I’m remembering again, this is the first case study, so it was a while back but I want to say it was in five to six months, that was accomplished. It was a huge, huge surge in his subscription revenue from those efforts. I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s something that’s so powerful. If you have the ability to showcase, if you do sell a product, if you can showcase it, that’s awesome.
Tara Newman: Here’s the other thing that I love about this. Most people won’t do it. Most people won’t do it. Let’s be honest, most business owners out there won’t do it. They’ll be like, “Oh, it’s too much. I don’t want to put my face there. They’re going to make something about themselves.” They’re going to be like, “Well, that’s a lot of people that I need to sell this to, to send videos to. This is going to take me a lot of time.” They’re going to find all the reasons why not to do it. If you’re someone who’s even an inkling curious about how this might work and are interested in trying it, you will stand out. In an automated world where everybody wants things to be easy and at the snap of their fingertips, people aren’t going to do this, so go do it. Go sign up for Bonjoro and start sending your videos.
Casey Hill: What I tell people too is to be data driven. A good example is there’s a company called CURE.
Tara Newman: Oh my God, Bonjoro has the best metrics.
Casey Hill: Yes. That’s one of the beautiful things about this. We had a company called CURE. They’re in the top 500 in the world charity. Someone reached out to me, they’re like, “Oh, this technology seems cool.” There was a conversation that happened but then we had to sell the board. The board was like, “I don’t know about this.” They were old school. They’ve been doing fundraising the same way for a long time and they were like, “I don’t know if this makes sense.” We basically got them to settle on this. I said, “Look, here’s what I want you to do. Do half your process the exact way you’re doing it right now. I don’t want you to change anything. Do your phone calls, your cold email campaigns or whatever, then for the other half, try video. I want you to keep track of how long it takes. Keep track of how long it takes you,” then at the end, we just have a math equation. I spent X hours, we got X result. Lucky for us, it worked out in our favor. They raised $10,000 more in the cohort that was sending personal videos in Bonjoros. That was well worth their investment of whatever it was, like eight hours of time to send these videos. The other thing is if you’re like a quantitative person, feel free to design the test. In Bonjoro, we’ll track your opens, we’ll track your watches, we’ll track your clicks responses. We’ll give you all the data, so you can look at that and you know your historical data, you know what you’ve been doing with your other system, so you can create that foil.
Tara Newman: I 100% agree. Also, what Bonjoro has helped me to do was convert people quicker. People have converted quicker through my using Bonjoro. It’s not just the amount of how many people convert. It’s also ease of conversion and speeding up conversion. I want to start rolling us out of here but I want to leave them with all the benefits of using Bonjoro in their customer journey. I’ve just jotted a couple down and Casey can fill in. Increased customer retention, increased income, increased customer experience. Increase your customer satisfaction with their experience with you. Increase referrals. Are there any more that we can add here?
Casey Hill: Conversion rates. One of the things I didn’t even talk too much about but the way that we use Bonjoro at Bonjoro is we welcome every single new trial. We get 1,500 to 2,000 trials and we welcome every single one with a personal video. That has dramatically increased our trial conversion. If you’re a person who has a space there, I think conversion is definitely one. Did you say reviews?
Tara Newman: No but that’s one that I’ve been wanting to try.
Casey Hill: That’s another one. Reviews are a great outlet, just like when you personally ask someone, “Hey, it would mean a lot if you could let me know about your experience,” I will guarantee you right now to everyone listening here, you will get way more buy-in than your automated email that goes out to everyone two weeks after and says like, “Can you leave us a review?” I will guarantee it. That’s another application. Gather customer proof, gather feedback around that, which is awesome. I probably shouldn’t say this on a live podcast but I’m going to anyway, is that we’re also working on a testimonial feature. I say I shouldn’t say this because engineering always yells at me when I forecast new features because I don’t know the exact time drop but it’s going to be amazing for that. We’re actually going to have this whole pre-package thing where they can easily record a video back to you. It’s going to be super cool. It’ll make even gathering testimonials and reviews even that much easier to give you that really powerful customer proof.
I think the conversion rates, reviews, using it, I think you covered a lot of the other core fundamental ones, like driving up customer lifetime value, driving up retention, driving up engagement. One other just really quick comment on that increased time. Tracy Phillips is another case study we have on the blog. She’s a video coach and her major pipeline was she would try to drive people into her Facebook community. Once they were in her Facebook community, she knew they would convert dramatically faster than if they didn’t join her Facebook community. That was a major. She jumped from 7% of her leads, joining her Facebook community to 55%, joining your Facebook community with the Bonjoro and that dramatically increased your time to conversion. Exactly what you said. Same application.
Tara Newman: And showing up to webinars.
Casey Hill: Yeah. Attendance is big. Also, I mentioned this a little earlier but the upsell application is also big. I talked about with Wildebeest too, if you offer more than one service and you’re trying to upsell, and move that person up, using video to create that interaction and goodwill is also a driver of where you can do that upsell or just personally inviting people to say, “Hey, I got this new workshop. I know you were part of this other thing that we did. I just wanted to make sure I personally invited you.” Now, it feels very concierge and red carpet where you’re personally inviting them versus just the generic, “We’re doing this thing next Friday.”
Tara Newman: What are some of the hesitations or objections that you hear from people around using Bonjoro?
Casey Hill: The major objections when it comes to Bonjoro were video in general. We touched on a few of these but people are uneasy about being behind a camera. We talked about that in a little bit of length. That’s probably the number one. People are worried about the time, which you always mentioned, that’s number two like, “This sounds cool but if I was doing this for often, I have 100 people I need to do each week.” There’s a lot of ways you can deal with that challenge. The first thing I tell people though is just to get in there and try it because often, it doesn’t take as long as people think it does. When people first start Bonjoro almost invariably, even when we bring on new employees, like when I hire people on my team, I still see the same thing. They re-record their Bonjoros a bunch of times when they first start, then once they get comfortable with it, they stop doing that.
Tara Newman: It’s so easy.
Casey Hill: Part of it is just learning. It’s okay if it’s imperfect. This is part of the situation.
Tara Newman: I’m going to share what got me over the hump with using Bonjoro, then some of the benefits that have come out of it that are not monetary. I signed up for a webinar with Kay Peacey. Were you on that webinar with her?
Casey Hill: Yeah, I was.
Tara Newman: Kay Peacey is an Active Campaign specialist. She was doing a joint webinar with Bonjoro with Casey. I don’t know what attracted me to it but I was on the webinar and that was the first time I actually was introduced to Kay. I was like, “Oh, she’s a really cool woman. I like what she’s talking about. I wanted to get on her email list.” Then I signed up for something with her and she sent me a Bonjoro. Kay is just such a lovely down-to-earth human. She’s just the best. She sends me this Bonjoro, she’s sitting in her backyard and she just rattles it off, and it was no big deal. I was like, “I can do that.” She was just in her element. There was nothing that was produced or even overdone about Kay herself. She’s just understated. She’s quiet. She’s a bit understated. She’s funny. She’s British but she’s just understated compared to what you see out there in the world of online businesses. I really, really resonated with that because I’m an introvert. I can be quiet—although I’m loud because I’m a New Yorker—I’ve always had like, “Oh, do I look okay? Am I saying the right thing on video?” She really inspired me to just show up and try it.
I allowed myself to just show up however I was at that moment. As people were joining my email list, I allowed myself to fumble over my words and not always be like perfect speech. I allowed myself to be quirky and improved, and in the moment. It really got easier and easier over time but what it actually did was open me up to video in other forms. It also helped me get my message across the thing I’m trying to say in a more succinct way. It was actually building a skill aside from having a positive impact on my bottom line. It was building my confidence. It was building my comfort level on video. When I had people in my program try to send Bonjoro, I said, “Don’t even make it about the end result. Make it about mastering this skill of showing up and talking, of communicating, of having confidence behind putting yourself on camera around being more succinct in what you’re trying to say. Let it be fun. Let it be a way to learn something and build a skill instead of just having this outcome goal.” That really worked for me. I just wanted to share that as well.
Casey Hill: I totally agree. By the way, I felt the same way myself, just like learning to do videos, then the positive reinforcement for when I would go out and record these videos, like out walking in my neighborhood or whatever else and people were so excited, you then get that affirmation from outside. You’re like, “Hey, it’s okay if I’m not totally set up or don’t look professional video and light studio, whatever, there’s shadows from the trees and everything else going on.” People still love these and they’re excited, so you get that affirmation to keep wanting to just show up and do it. Also, just a quick note on Kay. We’re crazy big Kay fans over at Bonjoro because she’s just been phenomenal but what I love about Kay too is her journey is just so remarkable. She started really small. She grew through relationships. She grew this incredible footprint. Now, she’s one of the top Active Campaign consultants.
I met up with the Active Campaign team themselves because we’re really close integration partners with them and they all are like, “We love Kay. Kay is amazing. Kay is one of our top consultants.” Just to watch myself in the course of two years go from relatively unknown to the top consultant for a $100 million a year business, an active campaign and she built that through relationships. Not saying Bonjoro was the sole responsible but she built it through relationships. That is such an inspiring story for people that are looking to take that business to the next level, feeling intimidated in those early stages. Invest in your customers, invest in your people because when you leave those experiences like Kay did for you where someone’s like, “Wow, that’s really cool,” that becomes the start of that relationship. Now here we are, me and you talking about how awesome Kay is. Her community becomes her advocates where we’re now all hyping her up. If anyone needed an AC consultant, I’m sure she would be the first one that neither of you would recommend.
Tara Newman: That’s 100%.
Casey Hill: That’s the thing that you create, which is fun.
Tara Newman: She really inspired me to be that person for my people. If for whatever reason you are not already on my email list, sign up. We have the Revenue Goal Calculator. I will send you a video. I’m also going to drop the Bonjoro link for you to sign up for Bonjoro. I am an affiliate. I affiliate for very, very few, if any, people, but I am just truly obsessed with so many aspects of Bonjoro, not just a tool but by their team like Casey, by their customer service, by their trainings that they have, by the ease of use of the interface, of how easy—I’m not the biggest techie person—but how easy they make it to create these workflows. I would really love to see more people using this tool.
Thank you so much, Casey, for coming on and having this conversation. Please feel free to reach out to me. I know the Bonjoro team is going to be reaching out to you if you sign up. We’re more than happy to support you in being really good Bears. Bonjoro has a bear. Be a part of the Bears community.
Casey Hill: Yes, thank you so much for having me. I love to talk about relationship building. I feel like it’s so important. We’re so excited to have you as part of our community. Thank you so much.
Tara Newman: Thanks, Casey.
