Vidyard email success: How knowing our vendors got a sale

I recently received an email from a video marketing platform called Vidyard. Ultimately we are soon going to be customers of theirs because they offer a product that we need we would never have known that had they not marketed their product in a way that caught my eye.

Success #1- Making it through spam filters and getting me to open

There are lots of resources out there that can help you make it into an inbox, yet I’m still surprised how many messages still clog my spam folder. Notice also the subject came from a live person instead of a “sales@vidyard.com” address. Here at Balihoo, we’ve found with a lot of messaging types that that single change can result in a 10-30% higher open rate (depending on the email.)

Success #2- “I was on the Balihoo site [and ]… noticed Marketo integration…”

Whether or not Kenny simply bought my name from a company that tracks what software we use or if he actually stumbled across our company’s page and was digging through our site source code, either way, he nailed it. On top of that he spent the time to figure out who at Balihoo is the marketo admin. Kudos! Don’t just consider vendors that a potential customer uses that are competitors with your product, but also look for vendors that integrate well with your product.

Success #3- Giving an concrete example

Next, Kenny informed me one specific way that their hosting software integrates. They push all video views to our Marketo activity log. Its definitely the biggest factor that attracted me.

Success #4- Dangling a carrot of “and there’s more!” for a CTA

While I had wished for tracking video viewing to our lead activity log, the thought that there would be other ways that Marketo could integrate with a hosting platform was intriguing. I wanted to see what other marketers were doing and this promise made sure I replied to this email.

(Possible) Improvement

This kind of effort can (and should be) completely automated. Its easy enough to buy Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot customer lists. It doesn’t take much to compose an email with dynamic tags, “I was on the #Company website and noticed … your #SoftwareVendor integration…”. Creating these emails by hand with a sales rep looking up source code would mean 3-5 emails per hour would be the max, but an automated system could send out thousands in that same time, enough “from” each sales rep that there inbox had just the right amount of replies.

Overall, great campaign. We will be switching to Vidyard come Q1 of 2014 due in a large part to this fantastic initial email (and great followup and demos from their whole sales team as well.)