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Founded in 2017, Bonjoro is a global company that provides all the tools you need to master personal video to build powerful, lasting connections with your customers. Growing to 45,000 users in just 4 years, Bonjoro serves a broad spectrum of industries, from SaaS to charities to universities, and online course creators. Their user community is embedded across the organization, in sales, customer success, customer support, and marketing. Bonjoro users leverage videos for simple, but very personalized messages such as welcomes, celebrating milestones, course creation, and loads more.
Bonjoro sets themselves apart in their industry by being all about that personal one to one touch. And by working very intimately with automation engines, they enable their customers to create that personal engagement at just the right touch point. That automation married with a personal touch is how Bonjoro helps their customers be successful.
Breaking through the noise
One of Bonjoro’s deepest integrations is with ActiveCampaign, and because Bonjoro understands the value of knowing to send the right personalized message at the right time, deliverability and inbox placement are key. By segmenting their subscriber lists and being more deliberate about messaging they’ve been able to avoid the promotions tab and achieve better inbox placement.
We live in a very noisy world and Bonjoro is all about figuring out how to stand apart. “People are used to getting very fast, digestible bites,” says Casey Hill, Head of Growth at Bonjoro. “With video bites, you have a second of their attention so you have to be really concise. People don’t want to read through a knowledge base that’s some 50,000 words, they want the information fast, like here’s a one minute video about how to do this specific thing, and then take it to the next point. That’s the kind of learning style that people are becoming more and more accustomed to.”
They’ve found that those personal invitations to click through have a dramatically higher rate of getting people to engage with the message, increasing both conversion rates and the bottom line. Bonjoro is committed to deliverability best practices and has found that segmentation is their key to better inbox placement.
“You invest as a brand to engage at that key moment to make sure that we’re getting in front of our customers as human beings. When talking about deliverability, you need to talk about segmentation. That’s why we’ve had success with ActiveCampaign. ” – Casey Hill
Another reason Bonjoro sees a high click through rate in their messages is the presence of a Bonjoro video in their emails. “We have the emotional impact of you seeing a personal video, and you’re like, oh, that’s so cool, and then here’s one thing you can do.” They purposely keep their messages very simple and limit the number of CTA’s, because they know what works.
According to eMarketer, approximately half of those marketers who use video in email campaigns see increased click-through rates, increased time spent reading the email, and increased sharing and forwarding.
Lessons of the past
Casey learned first hand what it means to execute email campaigns without that baseline understanding or knowledge of deliverability. “There were many growing pains from doing cold outreach. From acquired lists to copy and pasting the same email over and over again I learned a lot. At the end of the day, it was clear to me that you need to send people stuff they want to receive, and if you send too much stuff that people do not want to receive, you’re going to get marked as spam.”
“The algorithm is kind of designed to try to lead towards doing the right thing. They want to see you targeting them with relevant content, being upfront, transparent, candid, and making it easy for people to leave. All of these are customer-centric behaviors and say do what’s best for your customer, and we will reward you.” – Casey Hill
Bonjoro’s book of deliverability best practices
“People just don’t know how the system works. They say, I’m getting horrible opens here so I’m going to go to this other tool that will give me good open rates. But it’s not going to work. If you don’t fix the problem, the systemic problem, the root cause, and you’re just transferring that to another platform. And that always catches up to you. So it comes back to providing the right education and structure.” – Casey Hill
When you are trying to dig out of a deliverability hole, you might have to ask for an extra lift from your subscribers, and make it explicit, pull us to the inbox out of spam or add us to your address book. Another thing I feel is key, is asking a specific question in the first email. I encourage people, ask them something right off the bat, get them to share, reply and engage.
Bonjoro’s approach to reaching the inbox starts with that first touch, asking the prospect for more than just a name and email, and gathering as much information about the company as they can. By building out a full profile for their contact lists, they have a jump start on personalizing their marketing efforts and makes segmenting their lists for targeted campaigns much more effective.
“I always encourage people to ask more questions, you’re gonna get more qualified opportunities, Your lead quality is going to go way up, and people’s emotional commitment also goes up.”
The second thing Bonjoro does is segment their lists based on lead scoring and behavioral tagging, and they are able to seamlessly pass data from Bonjoro to ActiveCampaign, providing another point of data for lead scoring, allowing for deeper segmentation.
List hygiene is another best practice that Bonjoro abides by, but as Casey has learned, sometimes doing the right thing isn’t always popular with the team. “The better you are at list hygiene,” says Casey, “the better data and performance your tools are going to provide. It’s very common to get pushback about removing contacts, but over time it’s the slow progressive type of approach that allows people to see the light.”
Finally, allow people to leave. Email isn’t the right platform for everyone. “You don’t love email, cool, unsubscribe,” says Casey. “Make unsubscribing easy, make it clear and accessible, and be okay with that experience. Someone unsubscribing does not destroy your email reputation, so you absolutely do not want to make that process hard or confusing or challenging.”
Bonjoro is clearly getting it right. Just in the last six months, Bonjoro has seen an 11% reduction in churn with users who have received onboarding emails sent from ActiveCampaign automations. They are reaching the inbox, and their subscribers are engaging with their content.
How can ActiveCampaign customers take advantage of what Bonjoro has to offer?
ActiveCampaign offers a direct integration with Bonjoro allowing you to easily utilize the personalized touch of videos with the built-in customer experience automation of ActiveCampaign.
If your organization isn’t seeing the inbox placement results you’re expecting, the Deliverability experts at ActiveCampaign are available to help troubleshoot your concerns. Contact us at help@activecampaign.com.
