075: How successful membership sites use video marketing – with Oliver Bridge

Oliver Bridge is the CMO at Bonjoro, an app for sending personalized videos to welcome and onboard new customers. In this episode, he joins Ward to discuss real examples of memberships using videos to maximize their conversions and improve their user experience.

✍️ Show Notes

📄 Show Transcript

This transcript is computer generated, please excuse any errors 🙂

Ward Sandler: Welcome everyone today. I’m talking to Oli Bridge, the CMO at Bonjoro, an app for sending individual personalized videos to welcome and onboard new customers and clients. Oli has extensive knowledge of startups and marketing. Today is here to talk to us about all things video-marketing. Oli, welcome to the Membership Maker Podcast. We’re delighted to have you!

Oliver Bridge: Yeah. Good to talk to you again, excited to share some more stuff about video today!

Ward Sandler: Awesome. A membership site has its own unique objectives and challenges, and we’re sure you have seen many different initiatives and strategies out there. Can you give us some examples of successful membership sites using videos and provide them insights and how they got those results?

Oliver Bridge: Yeah, definitely. I’ve got three really good ones. I can share with you today. So I’m going to break them down. I’m going to call them like different funnels as well. So we’ve got a customer, John, who’s got a business called bulldog mindset and he uses Bonjoro and video for like a lead conversion funnel. So his approach is to, he’s got a lead magnet, and when someone downloads his lead magnet added into his, Bonjoro account, I think he sets up an automation, so he’s like, ‘Oh, this lead magnet, people download it, and then he watches for the most engaged non-converters’ It’s basically like, someone’s come into this membership space, they’re engaging with lots of pages, but they haven’t converted and haven’t paid. He then sets up an automation to say, ‘Hey, now’s the time to engage this person with a personal video, because that’s just not sort of tipping over the line’ So I guess this is, yeah, you call it like most engaged non-converted as it’s a bit of a mouth full, but, um, I think it’s a really great approach of what he does is he basically AB tested, sending his normal email to this group of people. Versus sending a personalized video where he then tried to drive them to the next step, and I think he went from using emails, 6.5% of them were ending up paying. And when he started to impersonal video, went out to about 16%. So, you know, really big uplift, um, really cool thing that he did was like really like rigorously AB test it as well. Um, because he already had that sort of great funnel setup where he was watching for the people that probably should have engaged, but weren’t. So it’s tipping them over the line was really cool. Um, and then, uh, another one I’ve seen that I love is a lady called Tracy Phillips who runs a company called video script success. Um, and she had basically, she had an existing funnel, which was a lead magnet. The download became part of her list and she would send an email to try and get those people into her private Facebook community. So I guess you could call this like a VIP community funnel, and she did the same thing as well. So she switched up from sending an email, sending personalized videos, and the call to action is the same. So it’s like, you know, join my private community on Facebook, where I share more about X, Y, and sad and help you get value around creating video scripts for your business and all this sort of stuff. Um, and that simple switch up from email to video. She went from 5% of her list flipping over into a Facebook community to 55%. So over one or two over one in two people suddenly coming into Facebook community, which makes our community richer. It definitely helped to nurture more leads as well, and she said to us that it brought down like her, her leave conversance, a timescale wants it in the community. The people that come in from like three months to about five days. Um, because they’re already much more primed and ready to engage and be part of that community. So I thought as a really cool one, I think like lots of, you know, memberships, you know, sites could be using that, you know, where they’ve got that community, like getting more and more people in there. It’s, it’s good on all fronts, I guess. And then the last one is it’s more about refunds. I always think a good way of looking at refunds is to reverse engineer, like who are your best customers? So if you can get your other customers yeah, taking those same steps as your best customers, you’re probably going to reduce your refund rates. So we do this at Bonjoro and I’ve seen lots of different membership sites use this as well, which is basically identify those like super fun behaviours. So it could be, something like they watch your course intro video, they introduced themselves on your Facebook group or the group to your community, maybe they download a particular piece of content that, you know, is like a really sticky piece of content that makes people stick with you and pay. And then, you know, sending what we said there is sort of joy in the onboarding phase. Send a personalized video pointing them or sort of outlining those three, like crucial steps because sometimes during your onboarding or storing, someone’s like first two to four weeks with you, they will probably get an email from you about one or two of those things. Maybe all three of them, but they’ll come at different places and they might miss them, but you’ve really want to drive that behavior. So I definitely think a really great way of using videos to say, you know, take the opportunity, send a personal video and outline all three or two or four of those specific behaviors in that one video, and get them thinking about those things. And then they’re on that path to becoming like a super fan that’s really engaged with what you do.

Ward Sandler: About using these videos, like an onboarding sequence, like a pretty common thing that people do is when someone joins their membership, maybe they send out one or a series of kind of onboarding emails. ‘Hey, check this out, check that out’ Like you said, try to encourage that super user behavior so that people, you know, stay retained as a members. Have you as Bonjoro, or anyone, you know, have successfully kind of used videos as like, as part of the onboarding sequence instead of just plain email.

Oliver Bridge: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess for us like the bread and butter, the reason we built Bonjoro was for onboarding videos. So, you know, we had another business back in 2016, it was a software business, and we were struggling during that onboarding phase to get engagement. Um, so we basically hacked together a video tool, that we can send personal videos to all of our new sign-ups who are on trial and get them more engaged with our product. So definitely onboarding videos is a big one. Use video for that, like test it against your existing onboarding videos and your existing, flows. It is a really big one. And I think as well when people are, you know, if you’re a course creator and that’s what your sort of memberships is about keeping people motivated is a good one. So imagine someone gets to like the end of a sequence of your course, it’s like end of a complete site, 10 of your different lessons. Now sending them a video just to like give them a bit of a high five or like keep them motivated. I think that’s a really great piece as well.

Ward Sandler: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Oli. We really appreciate it. Would you like to share resources or recommendations for folks trying to learn more about Bonjoro?

Oliver Bridge: Yeah, I would. So I wrote a thing last year called the Video Funnel Playbook. This is basically just like lots of templated, like pre-built plays for how you can use video, so if you go to the video funnel playbook, you can just Google it, and it should come up at the top, then it’s about 35 different points in your funnel that you can use video to get great results.

Ward Sandler: Thanks.

Oliver Bridge: Thanks, Ward.