“In today’s day and age, if you aren’t doing something to make your eCommerce brand stand out, you will be gobbled up by the big players like Amazon. You need to have a purpose” - Anders Ankarlid
...
A Good Company, founded by Anders Ankarlid, is an eCommerce brand with a mission. Instead of just another eCommerce brand promoting mindless consumption, Anders wanted to build a brand focused on sustainability and humane production.
Not only does the company donate 4% of its profits to environmental or sustainability-focused organizations and non-profits, but they work and source materials that have been produced in ethical and sustainable ways.
The company has been growing quickly but wanted to make sure they never lost the human aspect of the brand and what they stand for.
While looking for a repeatable and scalable method to stay connected to customers, Anders heard about personal video and wanted to give it a try.
Scaling their efforts to 7000 videos a month
At first, his team was skeptical. They had thousands of orders each month! How would they have the time to welcome them all.
Anders decided to have one of his employees based out of the Philippines take on the mantle of welcoming all new customers.
Each new addition to The Good Company family would be greeted with a video like this…
I mean she even brought her dog into the video! That’s amazing!
There is something special about hearing a real person say your name and take the time to personally greet you. As a consumer, you feel like more than just a number.
The Good Company sends a lot of Bonjoros. Around 7000 a month to be exact. And their opens rates average over 70%!
The reply rate is also remarkable. As Anders puts it, “We have hundreds of people each month [over 600] that are responding and starting one-to-one conversations with us. It’s incredible. We never had that with our automated emails”
Anders continued by saying, “The biggest result at the end of the day was the increase in return customers. We saw after just one month of implementing Bonjoros that our repeat customer sales went up by 32% according to Shopify”.
Depending on their average sales volume, this easily equates to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional sales over the course of a year. All for a few hundred dollars a year subscription to Bonjoro. Not a bad ROI.
But what about the time? 7000 videos a month might sound crazy to some people!
How The Good Company systematised their personal video efforts
Unlike the other personal video tools on the market, Bonjoro has a unique edge and that is dozens of internal, pre-built integrations, like what Anders uses with Shopify.
What this means is as soon as someone purchases, you get a task on your phone or desktop to record them a personal video and it has all the relevant context (what they have bought, how much they spent etc.). All you have to do it open the app and hit record, the rest is standardized for you via a template (subject line, background etc.). This makes a huge difference by removing the manual process of adding people.
Just record and send at just the right time to capture your customer’s attention.
But back to that 7000 number. What does that really boil down to?
Well, the average Bonjoro takes about 30 seconds to record. So if you do the math at 7000/month, that means a person would spend about 3 hours a day (assuming a 5-day work-week) for recording of Bonjoros.
So The Good Company is making hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue from something that takes part of one employee’s day.
Furthermore, many companies (like us here at Bonjoro!) break it up. If you have 3 people recording, you are only at an hour a day!
People are surprised at how many you can send once you get the hang of it.
Ander's top tips for succeeding with personal video in Ecommerce
After chatting with Anders, here are a few tips we came to on how you can replicate this success for your eCommerce business.
Timeliness matters:
If you have a usecase similar to Anders where you are thanking new customers, the sooner you get them a video, the better! So for example, if you had one hour a day to record videos, it would be better to do 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening than just 60 minutes in the evening. At Bonjoro, we have tested hundreds of different variables and to date the #1 highest correlated factor behind opens and engagement is how soon we send them a Bonjoro to when they open their trial.
Make it casual:
Notice in the video above from Klarysse she takes the video with her dog in the frame? She does others with a pillow or various things around the house. The idea is they are casual, which is where personal video seems to perform best.
Use Funnels:
When talking with Anders he notes there is no way the team would be able to send as many Bonjoro’s as they do if the tasks weren’t automatically created. He uses Shopify (a native integration) but also has Klaviyo which we discussed he could connect via Zapier if needed. For anyone who isn’t using one of our native integrations, remember that any tool that is on Zapier can also be connected.
Give your own Ecommerce a lift with personal video
If Anders' story has inspired you to try personal video yourself, you can get a free 14 day trial of Bonjoro right here.
You'll be in the groove of recording your videos within minutes, and better customer relationships and higher lifetime value will follow swiftly behind.
