Personalizing Email Marketing With MailVu

Several people who have attended our Explore events around the country have gone out of their way to compliment me on the personal nature of how I handle Explore’s marketing. One of my approaches is to be very personalized in my approach. I send personal notes (yes, sales letters to be honest) via LinkedIn to people I think might find the events relevant. But when someone registers, I also take the personalization a bit farther using a tool called MailVu.

So when a registrant, let’s take Shannon for instance (for the purposes of this blog post a made up attendee … didn’t want to jump through the permission hoops this morning), registers for the event, I get an email with the registration and receipt of payment. I immediately jump on MailVu where I have a customized email template set up with SME’s logo and record a quick video saying, “Thanks for registering!”

Shannon then gets an email that looks like this:

And when she (or he, I suppose), clicks on the video still, this plays:

The videos take me 30 seconds to record and another 30 seconds to address and send. One minute out of my day and I’ve put a nice little personal bow on a purchase. Granted, this approach won’t scale too well. We get about 250-300 attendees at Explore events and they register over a two-month period, so I can afford 300 minutes in that time frame. If I’m selling 500 items a day, it’s impractical. But for small businesses or ones that want to really put a high-touch value on their interactions with customers, this is one way to wow ’em.

I would love more than anything to send you a video thanking you for registering for Explore Orange County (Oct. 18-19 in Orange, Calif. — check out details over at GoToExplore.co.) So register and come join us for Peter Kim, Michael Brito, Zena Weist Tom Webster, Joe Heinl, Nichole Kelly, Tamsen Webster, myself and more. It’s gonna rock, SoCal!

Here’s the registration form. And if you use the Promotional Code ILOVESME, you’ll get the early bird discount even though it’s passed!

For more information on MailVu, check them out at MailVu.com. And for disclosure’s sake, I use a review account at MailVu, but they aren’t a client or a sponsor.