{"id":4997,"date":"2016-05-26T10:02:40","date_gmt":"2016-05-26T15:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/blog\/?p=4997"},"modified":"2016-05-26T10:04:36","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T15:04:36","slug":"email-video-responses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/?p=4997","title":{"rendered":"How to make raving fans out of random people who email you"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One surprising downside to building an email list is how crazy your own personal inbox\u00a0gets.<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;m writing this\u00a0I have 110 unread messages in my inbox. I&#8217;ve processed 125 emails just today and have responded to over 300 emails this week so far.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m 1,000,000% honored that people care enough about what we&#8217;re doing at VF to email asking questions and, frankly, giving us the time of day.<\/p>\n<p>So this isn&#8217;t a complaint. It&#8217;s a reality.<\/p>\n<p>It takes me multiple days to respond to my own wife and close friends.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this week I noticed that I had over 300 unread support messages about our free app <a href=\"https:\/\/listgoal.com\">ListGoal<\/a>. Total fail on my part: it just got buried under all the other emails.<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Today I wanted to share a\u00a0quick hack that&#8217;s helped me do a better job with email. Obviously it isn&#8217;t a complete cure (thus the 100+ emails in my inbox), but it&#8217;s made a SUBSTANTIAL difference in how we process email at VF and my ability to give time to the people who matter most.<\/p>\n<p>This is how it works:<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Step #1:<\/strong> You receive an email that looks like it&#8217;ll take decent chunk of mental bandwidth to process.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Step #2:<\/strong> Instead of procrastinating on responding, hit a button in your browser to start recording your webcam and screen. (I highly recommend\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/Screencastify.com\">Screencastify<\/a>\u00a0for this.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Step #3:<\/strong> Start reading through the email out loud and answer their question as you talk through the email.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Step #4<\/strong>: Copy the link to the video and paste it into an email for them.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Here is a\u00a0quick example of this in action:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This is an email I got the other day. Typically I would read an email list this and think&#8230; &#8220;Hmm, that&#8217;s a weird question,&#8221; then archive it and move on.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" data-src=\"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/Skitch\/Kiwi_for_Gmail_1CF742AE.png\" width=\"704\" height=\"235\" \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/Skitch\/Kiwi_for_Gmail_1CF742AE.png\" width=\"704\" height=\"235\" \/><\/noscript><\/p>\n<p>But\u00a0instead of putting off ignoring it and letting it site there, I recorded this quick video reply:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/a\/manfisher.com\/file\/d\/0B8CUoZ1Yoi0VSG8ybHdtLWNxeUk\/preview\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Cool part is this:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>It takes much less time and mental bandwidth to shoot a quick video response as opposed to writing out a response.<\/li>\n<li>The perceived value and personal touch of a video response is much higher than with a written email.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><strong>Here is one last example:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Meghan responded to a 10ksubs launch email with a question. I responded to her with a video.<\/p>\n<p>Then look at what happened&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" data-src=\"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/Skitch\/Pasted_Image_5_26_16__10_03_AM_1CF747F7.png\" width=\"668\" height=\"528\" \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/Skitch\/Pasted_Image_5_26_16__10_03_AM_1CF747F7.png\" width=\"668\" height=\"528\" \/><\/noscript><\/p>\n<p>Instead of buying the $300 Rapid List Building\u00a0program from us, she upgraded to the $3,000 10ksubs program.<\/p>\n<p>Video FTW!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One surprising downside to building an email list is how crazy your own personal inbox\u00a0gets. As I&#8217;m writing this\u00a0I have&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4997\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.growthtools.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}