How we send onboarding welcome videos at Highrise
We do onboarding in a bit of an unorthodox way at Highrise.
We’ve written previously about how we’re trying to build the best relationships we can. Seeing as how the main function of Highrise is to manage your relationships, we wanted to have the best ones we could with our users.
After publishing that post, several people reached out to me to ask for deeper details on how we are able to accomplish sending personalized welcome videos day in and day out. I am super passionate about this subject, so thought I’d go into the steps we do daily to send most new users a welcome video.
This whole process is actually the first action I take in my work day. First up, I grab all of the new Highrise signups from the previous day, and get them into a spreadsheet.
Our signup data includes the city and country of origin of that person, so I immediately eliminate all signups from non-English speaking countries. I never want to make the assumption that someone speaks English, and they’ll have a far easier time translating our welcome email should they need to.
From there, I run each email address through our database individually to see activity in their account, such as have they imported contacts yet or added users. I also take a look at the domain, if applicable to get a better idea of their business. It’s truly humbling to see the breadth of businesses that use Highrise, and is a great overall exercise.
In a text editor, I keep a list of the person’s name, and any activity they’ve had in their account so far so I can reference that in the video. I also add their email address to a simple spreadsheet that I use to do a bulk upload into the video app we use called Bonjoro.
In the main spreadsheet with all the signup information, I add a tag for each person I’m going to reach out to. We use this when starting our onboarding email flow, as the people who receive a video from us do not get the welcome email.
Read more about our onboarding email process.
Once I’ve gone through the list, I import it into Highrise so the non-video folks are segmented out and can receive our welcome email.
My recipients are then bulk uploaded to Bonjoro, and I take my list and start recording. A lot of the time I’ll record the videos in chunks of five, which makes sending them really scalable, especially on weeks where I am on the email queue.
Anyone who receives an email can reply directly to the email with Bonjoro’s Gmail integration, and it comes right back to my personal inbox. All of my emails are autoforwarded to our Highrise account, so there’s complete transparency across the team on who’s reacted to the video, what questions they asked, and any of us can help them moving forward.
Total time investment? I would say 90 minutes a day to do about 30 videos. I actually do it around the bigger tasks I have to accomplish on any given day, and treat it as something to do when I’m looking to context switch for 15–20 minutes.
Is it scalable? Yes. Even if you get 1,000 signups a day, a list split up between 10 teammates could be accomplished in no time. And the long term payoff is completely worth it.
Have any questions, or want to dig in deeper? Ask me anything! alison@highrisehq.com or @alisongroves
