Successful Marketing Using Video and Email

There’s no doubt that publicizing free content like whitepapers and video can drive interested traffic to your website, but what kind of relationships you build with those people is perhaps even more important.

In this case study, we’ll cover how a guitar student and his teacher formed a rapidly growing business using video, how email marketing fits in, and what steps they can take to bring their campaign to the next level.

Background

We’ve all envied the talent of a performer of some type — an artist, an athlete, a celebrity, etc. — and said to ourselves, “I wish I could do that!”. Tim Gilberg, co-founder of The Next Level Guitar, has always found the sounds of his favorite guitarists to be “magical”, but it in his words:

He considered it some more and decided to take the plunge, seeking out a guitar teacher in his area. After learning quickly to play some of his favorite tunes from his teacher David Taub, Tim approached him about taking his own talent — years of experience in marketing and web site development — combining it with his teacher’s expertise, and unleashing it on the internet.

A few YouTube videos later and The Next Level Guitar took off.

Driving Traffic with Video

On-line videos have great potential to create a buzz and drive traffic to on-line campaigns. They provide an opportunity to offer content that can be accessed by a large audience for free, driving traffic to a campaign and establishing thought leadership on the subject they cover.

For their business model, Tim and David put guitar lessons videos up on Google Video and YouTube. They are entirely free to watch, and at the end of each video they briefly advertise a website, which ultimately contains lots of other free videos, print lessons, and a very active forum. They generate revenue through sales of DVD’s and paid memberships offering exclusive content.

Enter Email Marketing

In their videos, Tim and David drive traffic to a specific landing page (a squeeze page) meant to generate sign ups to their AWeber campaign before redirecting traffic to the main content page.

Through their AWeber campaign, they:

• Send an automatic series of follow up messages introducing the content site
• Send broadcast messages that provide more free information and drive traffic back to the content website

From the budding guitarist’s perspective, they know they have to practice to get better at their new craft, and a gentle reminder by email is a service to them.

From the business perspective, it takes prospective buyers an average of 7 contacts before they feel comfortable purchasing, so by getting people to return to the site, Tim and David increase the likelihood of each visitor making a purchase.

Suggestions for Optimization

The Next Level Guitar story is an exciting one in this so-called “Web 2.0″ era, where surfing the web is continually becoming more of an interactive experience. The Next Level Guitar has seen rapid growth for their list of subscribers, and this attests to the success one can find in marketing an innovative idea from the ground up.

Any smart entrepreneur sets to tweaking and optimizing the finer points of their operations once they have the basics down. I’ve been corresponding with Tim about their email campaign, and to his credit, he’s been very receptive to the ideas I’ve sent his way.

Here are three of the most important suggestions we came up with:

1. Increase Sign Ups to the List

I mentioned earlier how video viewers are driven to a site that has a squeeze page, meaning they have to fill out the sign up form on the landing page before they can see any real content.

So, I put myself in the shoes of the web page visitor to see how clear the sign up process seemed to me. When I loaded the squeeze page, I saw something like this (with the form highlighted and other content blurred):

On a squeeze page, the sign up form should be the strongest element on the page, with all other sections of the page driving sign ups. Yet, on this page, there’s quite a few other things going on that distract from this purpose.

So, I suggested to the guys that they:

• Simplify the page
• Relocate the form to a higher, further left position
• Make it stand out more

Although The Next Level Guitar is seeing quick growth for their campaign, I think that with some improvement to this page, it could be even more astounding.

2. Improve Confirmation Rate

When subscribers enter an email address into the sign up form on the squeeze page, they’re re-directed to a thank you page. This page is very important because it:

• Acknowledges that a request for information has been received
• Communicates what needs to be done to active a subscription

The more clearly these points are expressed, the better confirmation rate a campaign will have.

Currently, the form still sends subscribers to the default page our service has set up on our web server, with a very basic “Thank You For Subscribing” type message.

I suggested to Tim that he replace this page with one he creates himself on their own website. What better way to get the attention of the subscriber than to put a video of David (the teacher) with his guitar, talking (better yet singing) about how an email is in their inbox waiting with a link they just need to click on to get the info they requested. But that’s just one idea.

3. Boost Open Rates for Messages

When subscribers open their inbox, they see the “from” address and subject for each message as they decide whether to read or trash them.

I noticed that, for their campaign, Tim and David have a generic Yahoo! Mail address set, with just “David” in the from line.

To optimize the open rate of their messages, and to keep the message from going to the spam folder, I suggested to them that they set up an email at thenextlevelguitar.com and use that address instead, placing it in the “Name” that appears also.

If you can avoid it, never use free email addresses for your campaigns. Set one up with your web host to brand your campaign better and avoid delivery issues.

Closing Remarks

For sake of brevity, I’ve kept this list short, but there’s always more than a few things an email sender can find in their campaigns to optimize.

I sent Tim a list of some others suggesting he implement what he can. Later, we’ll check back with him and David to see what results they’re finding.

For the meantime, as you’ll hear trademarked in David and Tim’s videos: Rock On!

In doing the research for this article, I was struck by how great a resource this site would be to learning guitarists. For free guitar lessons, I truly recommend checking out Tim and David’s site.

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Justin Premick: Peter, Jonathan, Carol, I agree - that’s a cool idea. Looking into it

Gobala Krishnan: I used to do single optin - more subscribers, better for the ego No anymore though.