Important: Brand Secrets and Strategies has been rebranded to Retail Solved. Please swap all BrandSecretsandStrategies.com URL’s with RetailSolved.com. This is now the Bulletproof Your Brand podcast. Thank you for listening!

There is a better way to boost shopper engagement and grow sales. It begins with building a connected community. Let your customers know that you appreciate and value them.

Most brands spend more time trying to repeatedly re-acquire the same customer as opposed to nurturing their existing shoppers - why promotions are so expensive and ineffective. It’s a lot more effective to convert your existing customers into loyal evangelists. It’s also how you add rocket fuel to your growth while you future proof your brand.

Everyone is overwhelmed by the pandemic. There is so much noise and confusion. We all want to return to our lives. This creates a unique opportunity for you to differentiate your brand from others and stand out from the crowd. You now have the ability to let shoppers know how much you appreciate them. Let them know that you value their input about your brand. Invite them to belong to your connected community.

So Matt had a bit of a lightbulb moment and thought, okay, how can I connect with people in a better way? So people coming onto the website, making an inquiry that maybe couldn't hop onto a call at that exact moment, or Matt couldn't find the right timezone crossover to get on a call with them. And he decided to send personal videos to everyone, so to existing customers, but also to new inquiries that came through to that business.

And within a few weeks of doing that, the sort of responses that he got coming back from people like Matt, so Matt just to tell you, lives in Sydney, and he'd travel into work into the CBD, the central business district of Sydney, every day on the ferry. He lived in a place called Manly and he'd get the ferry. He'd actually send his videos from the ferry.

And with our chief technology officer, he basically hacked together a bit of a minimum viable version of a personalized video tool and he was sending these videos. And a lot of the responses that came back were really enthusiastic.

It helped him connect with people and actually a lot of them said, Do you wish that you had a way to instantly connect with your customers and have a personal conversation with them? Let's learn more about this tool. Let's start the show.

Now here's Oli with Bonjoro. So hello everybody. Thank you for showing up.

I appreciate you for being here and I'm going to share with you today a really cool tool that I found that is going to be actually the cornerstone of my new marketing strategy. So I'm going to show you how it works and Oli is here to help me walk through how to make the most of it. So how to explode sales with authentic gratitude.

First of all, I want you to please take a quick look at this slide and notice all the different brands that are helping me with this webinar series. When Expo West was canceled, I leaned in and I decided that the best thing I could do to help you grow and scale is to find the very best experts to answer your specific questions. And so the series is basically what you're asking for.

I get emails from people saying, how do you do this? How do you do that? And so for example, today, we're going to talk about how to explode sales by leveraging customer engagement.

And so that's why I'll be here. So anyhow, thank all the people that are showing up. Thanks to Bonjoro for being here and for Bonjoro for supporting this.

So Oli, you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Thanks for that. Good prompt for me. Yes.

I'm the head of marketing at Bonjoro. Essentially Bonjoro is a pretty simple app for sending personalized videos to convert and support your customers. I guess what that means is really sending the video emails that you send.

And really it's all about helping you send personal videos to customers or to leads or to anyone in your network at the right moment to spark a human connection. And a bit of our backstory, if I may. So well, my backstory.

So I had a cold breast juice business that I founded in 2014 in London, in the UK. That was after working in the software world for about 10 years. Got a bit sort of disaffected and thought I wanted to do my own thing, go that entrepreneurial route.

And that went pretty, it went okay, but yeah, I found it tough to scale it. I just couldn't quite figure out sort of how to go beyond the sort of local deliveries and go into the local markets, all of that sort of thing. So I had a pretty good distribution network, but just couldn't quite get to that scale level.

I think I just needed more of that capital to sort of, you know, take it to the next level and go to sort of retail with it. So in 2016, actually, my mentor, who will probably speak a bit more about later as well, Matt Barnett, who founded Bonjoro, reached out to me and said, look, I'm building this thing. It's a video tool, and I think it's going to be a really great way to help people sort of re-humanize the work that they do and connect with their customers better now that we're all moving a little bit more online.

So Matt sort of sold me on this vision and said, you know, I know you've got that entrepreneurial spirit. You've done your own thing. You've got the marketing now.

So you want to come on board and lead the marketing for this business. You know, he had been mentoring me, so he sort of, he could see what I could do. So I guess he sort of de-risked it a little bit from his point of view.

And in the last four years, so since we launched properly in 2017 to paying customers, we've become one of Australia's fastest growing start-ups and have over 50,000 users using our tool today, which is really cool.

Thanks for going into the things we're sharing now. And the reason that we're here is that I want to show you how to leverage this or how I'm going to start leveraging this going forward. So first of all, quickly, if you don't know who I am, my name is Dan Lohman.

I've had the privilege of working with brands from pre-revenue to multi-billion dollars in sales, hundreds and hundreds of brands. I've also had the privilege of being published in all of these different trade publications. And the reason I share this is because I've managed to create a niche, if you are help...

We'll get to that in a minute about the niche that I'm trying to help solve. But the point is, I'm trying to help you get your brand onto more store shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. And that's really my mission.

So please help me raise the bar and share these resources. And do me a favor and reach out to me and let me know what are the things that keep you up at night? What are the problems that you're facing?

And I'll do my best to find the best people to bring on to this webinar series or on the podcast to help you address those specific needs. And so the problem that I want to address, let's back up and talk about the elephant in the room, so to speak. The problem is that our food system is broken.

And what I mean by that is that it's really difficult, as Oli was sharing, for smaller brands to get on a store shelf and start selling and be competitive. And so I want to change it. I want to give you a competitive edge.

And the way I'm going to do that is with what we're talking about now with Bonjuro, which is a really cool strategy. By the way, you can see the hand moving, the gif. You know, 80% of natural brands fail within the first year, and I'm committed to change that.

Retail is not a marathon, it's a sprint. We need to plan for sustainable long-term growth. And the way we do that to differentiate ourselves is we need to figure out a way to connect with our customers.

And again, that's why Bonjuro is here. So there's some truths that I want you to consider. First of all, people still need to eat, especially now during this pandemic.

Healthy food is your best defense against any virus. Your customers need to know now more than ever that your products are available. And they need to be able to find and buy your products wherever they shop.

And our food system is broken, as I mentioned. And what I want to do is I want to help you compete more effectively. I want to give you the schools, the skills, and the tools and the resources to do that

And where this is all going is that pandemic has exposed serious issues in our food system. And what I'm really talking about here are the inequalities in terms of how you sell your products, how you get on our store shelf, the strategies that you use to get your products in and to the consumer. So we need to find better ways to help shoppers find and buy your products.

And more importantly, savvy retailers need your help. They don't really talk about this a lot, but this is what they need you to do. We'll get to that in a minute.

They need your help to bring your customer into their store. So let me back up a minute and frame this conversation around three key topics. One, share of wallet.

Share of wallet. If I've got a list of things that I need to buy every month, say it's $400 a month, that's how much money I need to spend on the items that I need to buy, right? The goal here, the way this game is played, is to get the retailer, get me to buy all my items in one single store, not invite me to go shop the competition.

And that's important because the strategies that we're talking about here on the webinar series, my podcast, etc. are all designed to help you leverage the strength of your unique consumer with the retailer. Secondly, market basket.

Customers don't buy just your product, they buy a bunch of other things with it. So the market basket is the sum total of everything a customer buys when they check out of a store. The reason this matters is because when you have a bigger market basket with a super premium product, et cetera, you bring more value to the retailer.

We're going to teach you how to capitalize on that to drive sales and leverage that relationship that you have with the retailer. And then more importantly, push versus pull. Traditional strategy today is how much money can you put towards your brand to promote it, to do some of the things that retailers expect of us.

We want to put you in a position where your tribe, your loyal community outside of traditional retail is so great that we want retailers to reach out to you and say, how can I get your product in the store and on the shelf? So we're going to talk about shopper engagement and what it is and why does this matter. So first of all, you need to understand this is the cold hard truth.

You don't owe your customer. If I go into the store and buy your product, you don't know anything about me. You don't know where I live.

You don't know how to use the product. You don't know if I like it or dislike it or whatever. We need to change that.

And this is your greatest opportunity to differentiate your brand. You've worked hard to build and launch an innovative brand. Now let's figure out a way to leverage that at retail.

So what I keep asking all brands is shouldn't your go to market strategy be every bit as innovative as the ingredients in your package? The Brand Your Brands Foundation has built our trust. And what we want to do is we want to help develop that trust and shorten that cycle where a customer comes into your network or into your tribe and starts trusting you and believing in you and then celebrating your brand.

And again, that's why buying journals here. Your shoppers are more valuable to retailers than any of the money that they charge. What I mean by that is the value of your shopping basket, your customer's market basket, is much higher than the customer that buys mainstream items or items that aren't super premium.

So traditional strategies overlook the value of your unique shopper. And what I'm getting at here is if you look at a canned top line report, or if you look at the strategies that other people use, they're very cookie cutter and they don't really identify what is unique about your customer. Retail is pay to play, and getting your brand discovered is really expensive.

And what I want to do here is help you level the playing field, help you get discovered quicker, and then develop that relationship with the customer. And the reason that matters is that 25% of your gross sales are tied to your trade marketing, and 70% of that is wasted or ineffective. What I mean by that is you're not doing anything to really drive that customer into your brand.

In other words, the sole focus of trade marketing is to introduce your product to a new customer. That's it. If you're promoting your product to me, and I go into a store and I get a dealer on your product, well, that helps me, but that doesn't benefit you.

That is an accomplished objective you have of trying to grow sales. So we want to change that conversation, and that's how we're going to do that with BindJournal. So natural brands have a significant competitive disadvantage as a result.

Big brands have deep pockets, and they can buy their way on our shelf and they can promote a lot. Small brands don't. And as Oli was talking about, we need to find a way where you can be competitive quicker.

And that's what we're really focused on here. So let's fix that and let's level the playing field. I want to challenge the status quo.

The status quo is that retailers have all the power. And I want to challenge it because that's not really true premise. Instead, retailers need brands as much as brands need retailers.

And I want you to think about your brand in terms of what you can do to help the retailer grow and scale with your products because your products, again, are bringing in that valuable consumer. So as I mentioned, savvy retailers need your help. And if you work with a savvy retailer and you provide the right insights about the customers, things that they can't get a hold of on their own, then they're going to bend over backwards to work with you.

And this is the secret that I've been using with my customers and throughout my career to gain a significant competitive advantage, such that I've even pushed around some of the largest and most iconic brands on the planet as a result. So let's talk about the shopper journey. The shopper journeys change and they have literally unlimited choices as it comes to where they shop.

What we want to do again is try to keep that customer in one store for that retailer. And we need to help them help. Everyone's fighting for their attention, so we need to find a way that we can leverage our relationship with that customer.

So we want to help the retailers, and this is what they need and they want. They don't need a bunch of canned reports, the same report that they get from everyone else. Or they need your insights, actionable insights they're not getting from anyone else.

So there's a myth that real shopper loyalty, something that's embossed on a card. And I want to challenge you. The reality is that shopper loyalty cards are nothing more than a coupon.

What I'm getting at here is I've got a loyalty card for every single airline I fly on. I've got a loyalty card for every single store that I shop at. Real loyalty is something that's earned, not something that you can buy and pay for.

So we want to convert your customers into loyal shoppers by giving them what they need, the solution to their problem. So it's all about relevance. And the goal here is how do you help your retail partner remain relevant?

Remember, we talked about how competitive the environment is out there. Well, the goal is to help your retail partner keep your customer in their store. And we want to help your customer stay in their store and get everything they want.

Generically speaking, retailers don't make anything. What they do is they sell the real estate that your product takes up on the shelf, that little slice of real estate. What retailers really want are three things.

They want more traffic in their store. They want a competitive advantage in their market. And they want a reasonable profit in the category.

And if we can help you help them achieve their goals, then savvy retailers might even help you accomplish your goals by selling more product. And that's why your market basket is so valuable to that customer, to that retailer, because it's that market basket that the sum total of everything you buy that is going to help them be competitive, help them future proof their brand. So the traditional strategy is you walk into a store and you need to figure out where everything is, because everyone loves a scavenger hunt, right?

Well, we want to change that. And for that reason, I'm saying retail is broken. We want to make it easy for customers to find and buy your product.

Trade marketing is a profit center. And we want to shift away from paying attention to the store or the distributor's profits to focusing on shopper satisfaction. And the way we're going to do that is by helping you, help the retailer get what they need in terms of margin and all that other stuff, by the customer they need.

And we're talking about total market basket, not the price per item. So retailers spend more time selling us what's on their shelves as opposed to selling us what we want to buy. And if we can help the retailer understand what our customers want, then we can help them with the right assortment and the right products that are going to meet the needs of the customers that our brand attracts, their most valuable shopper.

Traditional retail strategy today is kind of throwing everything at the wall and hoping to see what sticks. We want to get laser-focussed, and the way that we're going to do that is that we need to focus on how our customers interact with us. And for that reason, I'm going to say that marketing is broken.

Big brands spend all their time talking at us and not to us. Your success should be measured in how well you satisfy your customers, not on how deep your pockets are. And that goes back to trade marketing.

In other words, the value of your customer should be the focus of everything that we do here. So we don't want to rely on cookie-cutter strategies. Now, the reason people use cookie-cutter strategies is because they're easier to use.

But the challenge is they don't differentiate you from another brand. Simply put, the same top line reports of the same cookie-cutter strategies that someone uses to sell motor oil is not going to differentiate your organic baby food. So we need to focus on the way the customer shops.

So creativity is your greatest asset. And that's why I love this product, Gwainjuro, because it allows you to be really creative and you're going to see some examples of how that works. So it's all about engaging your customers and getting to know them.

And that's how you shorten the cycle of how you start working with that customer on a more intimate basis. So you want to develop a committed community around them. How well do you know your course shopper?

And this is exactly why I created the Turnkey Sales Store Strategies course. It's to help teach you the skills that you need to be able to identify who that consumer is. The challenge is, in a perfect world, if you could go talk to everyone at every store as you're buying and using your product, that would be ideal, but that's unrealistic.

So that's what this tool does, I mean, this course does. And when you can overlay some of the strategies that we're talking about, then that's going to help you take advantage, get a competitive advantage, by being able to speak the language of the customer, helping the customer get what they want and need. So the question is, how do they use the product after they take it home?

And then how do they evangelize or share your product with the customer? Now, the reason this matters is because when you look at traditional solutions out there, everyone thinks we're the same. The reality is that the core natural shopper is not a clone.

If you ever got a great deal on a product that you didn't like, we all have. We've been disappointed. You cannot spend too much money on quality.

You want a product that meets your needs, a quality that does everything that you needed to do and more. Oli's a new parent. Yesterday, we're talking about how he's buying baby food and stuff.

And we're talking about how he as a customer is going to go out of his way to buy the best products for his new baby and for his infant son. And so that's the idea of customer they want to bring into their store because the reality is that Oli buys a lot of other quality ingredients as well, products as well. So the committed natural shopper do not settle.

They want what they want. Now, when I started in this industry, everything was very genericized, very commoditized. So we talked about female had a household, 2.3 kids, etc.

What we need you to do is we need you to start thinking about what's unique about your customer. How does your customer buy a product? For example, the Lohas consumer.

In mainstream solution providers, think of the Lohas consumers who goes for a walk and eats a couple salads. In our world, it's someone who's also interested in reducing their carbon footprint. Someone who's interested in supporting local.

Someone who doesn't want pesticides in their foods, etc. And this is why we need to really get to know who that customer is. The input on the market basket is we want to understand how your customers buy your product and what impacts their buying decisions and how your premium products are driving more sustainable sales throughout the store.

So when you focus on the market basket, you're focusing on the total dollars that you're bringing to the retailer. And this is what they take home. So we want to talk about item count, how you're growing that.

You want to talk about how you're growing the profit in the category. And like I said, this is the focus of all my content. So there are a lot of webinars out there that I've produced that go into this in great detail.

So I'm not going to spend a lot of time here because I want to get to Oli, but I wanted to help continue to frame this conversation. So you want to focus on the long-term game. Remember, your customer is the most valuable customer in the store.

And the way that we differentiate your brand at retail is we want the retailer to think of you as a valued and trusted partner. And that's where all this is going. And to change your perspective, we need a way to help them understand that you're engaged in helping your customer appreciate and understand the benefit of buying from their store.

Personalization is the future. If you think about it, when people are shouting at the wind and they're talking at us, they're not talking to us, they're not engaging us, they're not having a conversation with us, and they're not taking the time to understand what's important to us. What do we want?

Shoppers want to feel your love. They want to know that they're important. They want to know that they matter.

The reason this is so important is because think of the impact of selling an item to a true friend. When you recommend a restaurant or product to a friend, there's that instant trust there. They instantly believe that you're giving them best advice and they trust you.

Imagine being able to do that with a customer before they even get a chance to really get to know your brand. This is all about customer engagement. And you got to remember that when you can do that, then your committed customer is committed to your success.

And the reason this matters is because this is how you convert occasional customers onto loyal evangelists. Now, imagine if you could do that on a larger scale, how that would impact your sales. Imagine how that would impact your trade marketing ROI.

So what we want to do is we want to help you build a connected community outside of traditional retail. And the way that we do that is to always put the customer first. Your shoppers are your most valuable asset.

I mentioned a minute ago that you don't know who your customers are. You don't own them. If you can bring them into a connected community outside of retail, then you have the ability to nurture them and communicate with them and get to know them.

FYou have the ability to send them coupons or to send them recipes. Anyhow, more importantly, you have an opportunity to get to really understand what your customer is like. What problem are you solving?

What is the language that they use when they talk about your brand? And then you can leverage that as you communicate with all your messaging through all your other vehicles, all your avenues, etc. So you can only commit to using the advanced strategies that the big brands are on.

That's category management. The reason I do what I do, my secret sauce, is by taking everything we've talked about so far and helping you leverage that with advanced strategies that the big brands are on to give you an equal seat at the table and better yet, a competitive advantage. And that's, of course, the focus of the podcast and everything else I do.

So leveraging the strength of the unique shopper to win at retail. This is the game changer. This is where you can leverage the unique strength of your shopper to help gain a significant competitive advantage.

And this is what retailers really want. So what I'm doing personally, and the reason that I'm excited about Bonjuro, I don't mean to make this sound like a commercial for Bonjuro, but the reason I'm excited about it is because in my industry, there's a lot of noise. And there are a lot of people out there shouting at the wind saying, hey, if you do what my great grandfather did, you're going to be successful.

And I want to change it. I want to level the playing field and give you a significant competitive advantage. And the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to help you help interact with you more and get to know you better and help you help address your specific questions.

And this is how you future proof your brand. This is going to be the core focus of my trade marketing strategy going forward. So most of you should have received a bond journal from me.

If you have it, you will be getting one. And we'll talk a little bit about how that works, why that matters, and how you can leverage it to engage your customers. Oli, go ahead, please.

Yeah, sure. So bond journal, we talked about, so at the top of the webinar, I said that it's a tool to help you send personal videos, to essentially to engage your customers at the right moments, to build those connections, human connections, that can turn into relationships with that customer. I just want to tell you a little bit about the backstory of bond journal, because it's a funny story, and it's just interesting how bond journal came about.

It was almost organic in the way it came into being. So we were running another business previously. Well, Matt was running another business previously, which was a market research tool.

And actually, Matt and the guys, it's a tool called Verbate. It's still going today. It's our sister business.

And it's market research, all done through mobile video. But one of the issues that Matt and the team at the time had, this was back in 2015, heading into 2016, was that they live in Sydney. And actually, a lot of the major brands, I guess, do a lot of their market research out of London or New York or other cities around the world that aren't Sydney and aren't on the same time zone.

So Matt had a bit of a light bulb moment and thought, okay, how can I connect with people in a better way? So people coming onto the website, making an inquiry that maybe couldn't hop onto a call at that exact moment, or Matt couldn't find the right time zone crossover to get on a call with them. And he decided to send personal videos to everyone, so to existing customers, but also to new inquiries that came through to that business.

And within a few weeks of doing that, the sort of responses that he got coming back from people, like Matt, so Matt, just to tell you, lives in Sydney, and he'd travel into work into the CBD, the central business district of Sydney, every day on the ferry. He lived in a place called Manly and he'd get the ferry. He'd actually send his videos from the ferry.

And with our chief technology officer, he basically hacked together a bit of a minimum viable version of a personalized video tool, and he was sending these videos. And a lot of the responses that came back were really enthusiastic. It helped him connect with people.

And actually, a lot of them said, this is cool, I don't know how you're actually doing this. If you built something like this properly, we'd probably pay for it. Could you maybe go and do that?

So we got a lot of the responses coming back, and Matt and Mitch, who was the Chief Technology Officer at the time, decided to build a tool, Bonjuro. And what they did was basically they used a tool called Zapier to set up a little connection between other apps. So if you're using like a MailChimp or whatever you're hooking up to, it can then take a customer contact, pull it into our tool, and you can then record them a video at the exact moment you want to connect with that customer.

So that was the sort of first early version of Bonduro. Matt just doing it himself, turning into this minimum viable product that we built using Zapier. And then three, four years later, we built it into a robust product that can support lots of different workflows and lots of different customers around the world, all using different CRMs and different marketing automation systems that all hook into Bonduro so they can send videos to their customers at the perfect moment.

This is a bit about it. We built it and after we built and launched it, so we launched in early 2017, I think it was January 2017, we launched a beta to our first paying customers who had said, we'll support this if you build it. And that's a little screenshot of our first homepage.

And really when we started out, we weren't really focused on the e-commerce space when we started out or the retail space when we started out. We were very much focused on new customer onboarding for software companies, because that's what we knew and that's what we had used it for. But in the years since, we've really been embraced by many different industry verticals.

So it's been really interesting to see how it's played out. So now, yeah, where we are today is, as I said, a robust tool that supports lots of different industries. And at its simplest, it's about sending personal video messages, so personal video emails at the moment.

We might expand that out into SMS and other delivery methods soon to thank and delight your customers. It's all about building relationships. And yeah, as I say, the key to it really is all in the timing.

So whatever business you run, we essentially hook up to your existing tools. So when a trigger event takes place, maybe a customer has paid for a product, you get notified in the Bonjoro application to then record that personal video. And we'll talk a little bit later about how people are actually using this.

And I'll show you some case studies around retail and e-commerce that I think are really interesting and prove how this can work really nicely. And one of the extra pieces of the puzzle is it's really about personalization. So when you want to thank or connect with customers, I think one of the limitations of trying to do something like this without a tool with Bonjoro is that actually truly personalizing to that specific customer is hard, unless you have in front of you details, information about that customer.

So part of what we've done is build in this thing called custom attributes. You can actually pull custom attributes from the moment of purchase into our application. So you can truly personalize what you're saying to that person, so the context is hyper relevant to them.

So what we do here at Bonjoro is really try and encourage true personalization rather than the sort of slightly quasi like fake personalization you see in lots of other tools out there. See, I wanted to bring a bit of, I've been speaking to Dan about the whole sort of gratitude and engaging customers and about thanking specifically. And actually I think sort of thanking is often a little bit overlooked by brands, all sorts of brands in lots of different industries, to be honest.

And I've written a few blog posts about this, and I published a white paper about customer delight a few years ago that got a lot of traction. And I've sort of dug in to a little bit, the reasons around really why we need to do it and why we need to do it better. So I'm going to go into a few of those here

So the first reason is there's been some studies out there, one of them, interesting one, that it can double your customer engagement. So when we're thinking about sort of getting customers to take action, to respond to us or to purchase our product again or to share our brand on social media, whatever that might be, thanking is really a very proven way of doing this. And there have been multiple studies to show this.

So yeah, I think that's the first thing to remember, really customer engagement, and it can double that customer engagement. And yeah, I'll share the link there, but maybe, Dan, you can share. The second reason really about customer gratitude and thanking and customer appreciation, I guess we could call it, is really about appreciated customers versus unappreciated customers.

So studies have been done around why customers leave a company or why customers aren't loyal to companies. And the biggest reason by a clear margin is that customers generally don't believe that you care about them. I know, Dan, that earlier in the webinar, you were talking about showing customers some love.

It's funny, when we launched Bonduro, I think our initial, our first sort of tagline was treat your customers better. You know, we really sort of started out with that. And we use it in different places now.

It's not on our home page anymore. But I think it's really important that you need to remind customers that you can really care about them to make sure that they're loyal and that they keep coming back to you and buying from you and talking about you in other places. And that sort of, really, you can see on that graph how much that is more important by the other elements that I think it's those other elements that a lot of brands focus on, customer service or competition, these sorts of things.

Whereas actually the key could just be, let's just make our customers love us again and love our brands. And then there's a third reason, which is really about shareability. And we see this a lot in the retail space at the moment.

So when a customer is delighted with you, your brand or your brand experience, it really compels them to go out and share that with the world. So a couple of screenshots here of people getting, I think these are just little sort of gift inserts into an e-commerce purchase that's been made that they weren't expecting, like a little pack of Skittles or something else. And these sorts of things, I think a lot of brands now, a lot of e-commerce brands anyway, are doing this sort of thing like package inserts.

But there's more we could be doing. And we feel that Bonjoro and personalized video is something that people could be doing. It's actually, this is really at the start of a curve of that type of customer appreciation.

There are very, very few retail and e-commerce brands who are truly engaging with their customers on a one-to-one basis. And I'll share a case study later that shows you can do this stuff at scale and really get that shareability going.

And yeah, this came up before in the study that I showed, but yeah, all about customers just wanting some love. So it crosses over with the second reason a bit, but a PwC survey here shown that in fact, 75% of customers want more human interaction in the future, not less. So I think that sometimes, I know from speaking to people in the space, there's almost a fear of over interacting with your customers.

You think that they don't want to hear from you. Am I sending too many emails? Am I going too sort of crazy with this appreciation piece?

I just don't think that's the case. If you do it right and if you do customer appreciation right, I think that, well, studies have shown that customers actually want more of this stuff, not less of it. And right now, in the middle of a pandemic in particular, particularly that sort of human contact has been taken away a lot.

So something like personalized video emails could really help you bring that human connection and interaction back with your customers. So yeah, I was really excited to share a few case studies with you all as well. So I think it's important to try and visualize what can actually happen when you start doing something like personalized video and sending videos to your customers at the right moments.

And also to try and understand what that right moment might be. What is the right use case, as we call it here? What is the right context to send videos and to appreciate customers?

So as a guy here, there's a screenshot there of a video from a company, Joe, who runs a company called Ojo's Coffee in Ontario. And he came up with the idea, so he started using Bonjoro. And his sort of neat idea, really great trick, was to send personalized video to one time buyers of his coffee.

So they would buy online e-commerce. They'd buy one pack of his coffee. And when he thanked that person for what he did, he set up a little trigger between his e-commerce point of sale system and Bonjoro.

And whenever someone bought a pack of coffee, he'd send a personal video to thank them. Really nice piece, one-to-one. Show them that he was roasting the coffee right there and then, and say, I'm going to package this up for you.

And then he'd tell them about his subscription offerings as well.

Hi, Lin, Joe from Ojo Coffee here. I'm just about to package up and send you this amazing Nicaraguan coffee that I just roasted up for you today. It'll be out to you tomorrow if you get this message before then.

I want to thank you for your business. I also wanted to point out that if you want to get Ojo on a regular basis, you can do, instead of adding to cart, you can do subscribe and save. And what that does is turns it into an Ojo Coffee subscription.

Now, the beauty is it's not a contract. So you can manage, pause orders, swap products, change your quantities. Basically puts you in full control.

I just want to, but we give you a bigger discount for that. So I just wanted to point that out to you as a little tip. If you knew that, great.

If you just want to order from time to time the way you have been, then that's totally cool too. We're happy to roast for you either way. Just wanted to point that out.

Also wanted to thank you for your business. Thanks for supporting my small business. And more importantly, thanks for supporting those small family farmers who grow this amazing coffee that we get to roast and that we love roasting and get to deliver to you.

Take care and have a great day.

Yeah, I'm really glad we shared that because I think it's important to see it in action and see what it can do. And that piece at the end where Joe is showing the customer the coffee there and really, I guess, connecting the customer right back with the producer. Back in Nicaragua, I think that's a really, really cool piece that he does.

And actually, the results Joe's sending these videos have been really, really interesting for him and his business and a huge growth lever for him. So, yeah, Joe, through doing this, through sending these videos, he actually upsold 50% of his one-time buyers to a subscription. So he went, I think, at about 14 weeks of sending these personal videos.

He had been hovering around $35,000 a month, and he went up to $75,000 recurring revenue from those subscriptions. So really neat way of connecting with his buyers. Okay, so this is a company actually based out in Denmark.

They were one of our earliest customers a few years ago. And I think something they did is something that every, particularly every e-commerce store right now could be doing. So again, about customer appreciation, they had a bright idea of between the customer making their purchase and leaving a review.

I think most stores out there now, when a purchase event takes place, they maybe have an automated email that goes out seven days later, three, seven days later, whatever it might be, or after delivery, asking for a review. So what Monk Store did, they started to send a personal thank you right in the middle of that piece. So the customer would make that order.

One of the guys at Monk Store would record a video, show the customer their product and say, we're popping it in the post. It's going to get to you safely. Just make them feel supported and secure about their transaction.

And then they'd send their request to review. And after doing this, they saw their open rates from their review request emails go up from 50% to 75%. The click rate of those went from 19% to 32%.

And their review rate on Trust Pilots, this was a Trust Pilot in Denmark, from 10.2 to 19.4. And what happened actually is that Monk still pretty quickly went from somewhere sort of ranked on the sort of men's fashion category in Trust Pilot. They went to number one in the entire country of Denmark for men's fashion because of their Trust Pilot reviews.

And this was a really great way of them connecting with their customers and driving that delight and really getting, I guess, that sort of top of mind. You can see that from the open rate of the review emails and getting a result for their business. And that's something that they could then take to the market and say, Look, we're a really trusted brand out there.

Last one I want to share with you. So a company called The Good Company in the USA, really, really great sort of natural brand. They decided to send personalized videos to thank customers.

And actually, they've done something that we haven't really seen done before, which is really doing this at a huge scale. So they get something like 7,000 orders every month. And they decided to outsource the sending of these thank you videos to other people.

So when you're thinking about, is this something I could do in my own business? If you're a small business and you think this is manageable, absolutely something you could do. Even if you're a bigger business getting more orders, you can still think about outsourcing this.

You may have other services that you already outsourced. It doesn't mean you're not going to be able to connect with your customers. So they have a team of people that are out there sending these thank you videos for them.

And the stats here are amazing. We look at that. So 7,000 cents in this screenshot that I've got from their Bonjuro account.

74% open rate. 40% of their customers are viewing these. And then 30% of them clicking a little like button.

9% replies. So for an online e-commerce brand, getting that level of connection with their customer, getting 10% of their emails that are going out, coming back with a reply, maybe telling them more about themselves and why they wanted to support that brand. It's really critical information.

This relates back to what Dan was saying earlier, which is how much can we truly get to know our customers? And when we start leveraging things like personalized video, we can see that we get a much deeper relationship happening and we can use that in all sorts of other ways as we go to market. This was the last one.

It's not an e-commerce space, but I just really liked it. There's a... We have a...

He's a fantastic customer, Tim Muckelrave. He runs a YMCA camp at Michigan. And he came on...

We run a private Facebook group for all of our customers at Bonjoro. And he came on to the group. This was a few months ago.

And I'll read this out. So he came into the group and he said, just thought I'd share another success I learned off this evening. I sent a Bonjoro video out to a donor of ours, thanking her and her husband for their two previous gifts this year, totaling $12,000.

He just recorded a two-minute Bonjoro with a link in the body of the text to a video we put together of our summer. So the YMCA camp summer with the kids in and maybe some of the facilities that these two people had put towards. And he said he got another check today for an additional $3,000.

So pretty crazy. He sends one two-minute video just to thank a donor to his camp, and they send another $3,000 almost overnight. So I think it shows that sort of level of appreciation.

Like we said, when we look at those stats in terms of doubling your customer's willingness to engage with you, it can have a really huge bottom line impact. But a really nice like for me, I love the sort of culture vibe of this one. Tim runs a great camp, really great culture.

And I think what happens there is that when he sends these videos, his customers can really experience and his donors can really experience and connect with that culture.

Hi, Hillary. My name is Tim McElravey, and I'm the camp director up here at the Lake Wenatchee YMCA Camp. And I wanted to send you this video message tonight to say welcome and thank you for signing your son Parks up for our camp this summer.

It looks like he's coming up week number one in our Discovery Camp. I see that he is friends with Garrison, and Garrison is signed up. I also see there's a buddy request for a NOAA Underwood, and NOAA is not signed up yet, and the cabin is full as of right now.

So I may reach out to NOAA's mom and just let her know to get on the wait list. If you guys are looking to get them all together, I certainly have Garrison and your son Parks signed up in the same cabin. And if we can get NOAA in, we'll do everything we can.

So if we pause this one, I think this one is a slightly different... Yeah, there wasn't the donor thank you video, but that's the type of video that Dan sends out. And actually that's one, I think, to a parent of someone that was sending their child to camp and just connecting with them.

And something else they've seen at that camp, the YMCA, is that when he sends those sorts of videos, the number of referrals he gets really goes up. It's interesting, he sees a lot of parents that he connects with go on and refer his brand, his camp, to other parents as well. So again, when you take this into the retail and the e-commerce space, you can think about when you're sending these thank you videos or at any point in your customer's journey, wherever you're going to use it, you're really going to drive that engagement and shareability happening as well with their friends and their network.

And then most importantly, how does this work? I mean, isn't this a cool tool? So it's really easy.

So if you subscribe to one of my guides, you fill out the form and then you automatically go into my funnel. And as you can see here on the left, I use Drip as my email service provider. And what it does is it brings you into my funnel.

I custom tag you. And then right here on the right side of the arrow is that unique tag for that thing that you did, that specific guide that you downloaded. And you're limited by your creativity.

So the magic behind the scenes is really simple. What I do, I've got an automated funnel. And that's what this looks like in my email service provider.

And then that automatically triggers something in my phone. And then I get this notification saying, Dan downloaded the guide, which guide it is. And then I can send them a message.

And what's cool about it is in this case, my friend Andrew sent me a message back saying, hey, this is really cool, thanks. And then as Oli said, I get the stats. And the reason that matters is because you're able to convert an occasional customer into a loyal shopper.

And that's what we're shooting for here. So with that, that's, oh, you can see my hand move there. So it actually sends a gift.

Oli, your thoughts, what are the things that we've not talked about that you wanted to cover?

I think looking at the life cycle of your customer. So when I talk about personal video and we've looked at it in this webinar, a lot of the upfront gratitude for maybe purchases, but I think there's so much opportunity for brands to stand out with what they're doing post purchase. So thinking about maybe if you've got a loyalty program, how else could you invite people into your loyalty program that isn't your standard way of doing things?

So I'd really look at when you're coming across new tools like ours and personalized video that you might not have thought about using before, have a look at your customer life cycle and think, I'd almost think about it as a delight piece. So delight, where do you want to sprinkle these little moments of delight in your customer's journey? And I would map it out on a piece of paper when I do it here at Bonjour and I say, OK, this is our customer's journey.

I want to put some delight here, some here, some here. And I think that's a really neat way of looking at it. And as I say, post-purchase is really untapped when it comes to this customer engagement piece, the truly personalized customer engagement piece.

Thank you for sharing that. And the reason I wanted to talk about this is because I might have missed the videos, but I can send the links to the videos in email. Thank you for reaching out to me.

I'll go ahead and do that. So the reason I wanted to share this to recap is we talked about the importance of your customer at retail, how retailers need your customer. The real problem is that retailers are getting bombarded with big brands with deep pockets, and we want to wean them away from it.

We want to talk about what matters most. And what matters most is the unique customer that you drive into the store. And so what we want to do is we want to give you the tools and the resources to be able to leverage that consumer to be able to bring in to nurture them and learn more about them and get to know them better.

And then by doing that, we're going to help that retailer future-proof their business. And then savvy retailers are going to help us grow in scale as well.

Just a check. Ernesto, I think you said that these videos sent through email. Yes.

So any Bonjuro videos are sent through email. So like Dan was showing, when you connect up to your existing systems, you will need name and email to be pulled into the Bonjuro application to send your video through email. We're working on other delivery methods as well, for example, SMS.

But at the moment, it's just through email.

So Oli, what are some of the other case uses that you've seen people use this for?

So, yeah, I think, you know, think about sort of VIP programs and loyalty programs. So, you know, in various industries, industry verticals, I've seen it used by looking for sort of trigger points where you know someone's having a maybe sort of already enjoying your brand and trying to reward them. So, let's say, for example, a customer has come back and they've made their fifth purchase with your brand or they've crossed a particular threshold, maybe spent in the year $1,000 with your brand, something like that.

Is that something where if you're running that in a marketing automation tool or CRM, you could trigger a bondura task based off of that to then give that customer something a little bit different, a reward, but to deliver it in a personal way. So that's something that some people are doing, but not enough people are doing. I think it's an interesting one because right now, I guess a lot of that would just be done automatically.

So it might be an automated email that goes out. And I guess it sort of makes that customer feel like, yeah, they value me. But did they value me enough to actually sort of personally thank me and deliver this themselves?

And, you know, it can bring back that to human connection. So I think that's another one that I'd really have a look at VIP and loyalty reward programs and also looking at those sort of thresholds in terms of, yeah, high lifetime value customers and how you keep them engaged.

Makes a lot of sense. What I'm going to do is I've got a bunch of courses, and when someone finishes a course, I'll reach out to them and say, OK, what questions do you have? Or when you reach out and you want to connect with me, I'll use this to set up your free 30 minute call.

And by doing that, it gives me an opportunity to connect with you one on one. So before the pandemic, I was able to do connect with a lot of people at trade shows or stages, etc. But now we have the pandemic, so now we need to think about things a lot more differently.

And so this gives me an opportunity to develop that personal one on one relationship with someone. The reason I think this is so cool is like Oli said, is that you now have the ability to reach out and connect with your customer, to leverage it, to engage them, etc. And then one of the cool features that we haven't talked about yet, that I haven't used, but I'm looking forward to, is that you can send out a bunch of messages to a common group

They call it roll up. Oli, you want to talk about that?

Yeah, so we had a lot of customers come to us and say, they love doing the one to one piece, but they also wanted to connect with bigger groups in the moment. So it's still going to be personal. It's still going to be, you know, any given day, they just wanted to broadcast a message to a small VIP group of customers.

So we created a tool, well, a feature that we call roll ups. So you can take a list of customers, select all of them, roll them up into one contact, and send a personal video to that group of people. They all get their own separate video.

But it means you can make it sort of contextual to that moment. So, you know, it could be like, hey, it's Friday, just recorded the webinar, wanted to make sure that I was connecting with all of you guys and letting you know how it went, something like that. Or, you know, we've got a new product line that's just come in store.

We know that you've bought it before, and we wanted to reach out and let you know. And actually, the neat part of roll ups is that even though you're sort of broadcasting it to a group of people, you still get all of those individual stats. So you can dive into your results, and you can see, okay, did that person open it?

What's the video? Did they click through on the button that I put next to the video to redeem their offer or to redeem the discount or whatever it might be? And if you think about this from maybe launching a new product line, for example, in their local store or in a store near them, and you sent a video to a group of customers that you know are in that location and say, oh, by the way, click on the button next to this video to pick up your unique coupon where you can go and get two or three free, if you purchase five, whatever it might be, then you can really drive that in-store footfall.

So there's a lot of interesting use cases for the roll-ups feature when you're thinking about how you segment and group your customers together.

Thank you for sharing that, Farrell, to answer your question. Yeah, I'll send you everyone an example of what this looks like. And, of course, you get that when you get the bonjour, but I mean, when I send you one, but I'll send you an example of that is what Oli was talking about.

Imagine being able, like you said, to tell about a new product. But here's another thing. I know a couple of you that are watching right now are struggling trying to get your brand in front of new retailers, different buyers within retailers.

You could send them a quick video. Hi, I'm Dan. This is my new product.

Just wanted to see if I could schedule a couple of minutes with you, something like that. In other words, there are a lot of creative ways that you can use this to engage with people. And the point is that, again, we're limited by our creativity.

We've got to think strategically. We've got to be every bit as creative and innovative with our go-to-market strategy as we are with the ingredients in our package. And the reason this matters is because this is how we level the playing field.

Again, if we can help a retailer gain a significant competitive advantage by leveraging the strength of our unique consumer, this is how we become a trusted and valued resource. This is how we become what I would call a category leader. A category leader is any brand willing and able to step up and help their retail partner grow sales by leveraging the insights and the strengths, et cetera, that you bring to the table.

So Oli, thank you for being here. Everyone, thank you for being here. I appreciate it.

There will be a replay. If you want to go back and watch it, give me a couple hours to get it put together. Any other questions?

Any other thoughts, Oli?

No, I'm just glad to do this with you, Dan. It's been good. We've chatted a few times before the webinar.

And for me, it's been a new opportunity. As I say, Bondura is used in lots of industry verticals. And, you know, we're really only scratching the surface with e-commerce and retail.

And I'm really excited to see where your listeners can take this.

Me too. Thanks. I appreciate it.

Thank you, everyone, for being here.

A key reason marketing is largely ineffective is because it overlooks your individual customer. Personalization is the future of our industry. Early adopters will gain a significant competitive advantage. It’s as easy as starting a conversation with a new friend and it does not require any complicated algorithm.

You will learn how to:
Nurture new customers and make them feel welcome and appreciated
Thank them for choosing and sharing your brand
Onboard customers and introduce them to your brand. Share your brand story.
Build trust and authority. Shoppers look beyond the four corners of your package. Be transparent and authentic
Shoppers value mission-based brands. Invite your customers to partner with you to make a bigger impact. Make it easy for them to help you do more good on their behalf
Share and perfect new product innovation with your tribe before launching in retail. This will save you valuable time and money. Imagine knowing you have paying customers lined up and waiting for your new products before you launch
Maximize your trade promotion ROI with a customized rewards program for your loyal tribe and laser targeted promotions at retail
Check-in with shoppers to learn more about them and the problem you are helping to solve. Learn how your brand has made a difference for them or what more you can do
Share actionable insights gained from your commented community with retailers - what retailers REALLY want
Future proof your brand. You don’t “own” the shoppers who buy your brand in retail. Your shoppers are your most valuable asset. You do not have a brand without them. Learn creative ways to boost loyalty and shopper engagement
Leverage your connected community to boost sales and profits in traditional retail and on-line