We live in a world today of cluttered inboxes, fragmented attention and technological feature overload. If you are a small business, or even a large business for that matter, getting the attention of prospective clients takes customization and personalization.

Recently, the company that I work for, an inbound marketing company called ONTRAPORT, picked up a new tool to help with changing up both the pre-sale dialogue and the post-sale dialogue…. and it’s pretty incredible. Incredible enough that I felt inclined to write a blog post about it. That tool is called Bonjoro.

In a nutshell the tool allows you record a quick video on the app and shoot it over to an email. You can add a quick note, or a call-to-action button to supplement it. It ties in with a lot of tech systems, like your CRM or an online form, to automatically generate the video for you.

Recording a quick video for a potential customer breaks through the noise of all the other emails they are being inundated with and starts things on a positive note. It harkens back to a time when business deals were more commonly closed in person, and there is a definite value to be had there. For ONTRAPORT, it has definitely given us a tangible bump in attendance on our software demonstrations and I think helped to develop better rapport. Not only that, but once someone is a customer, I often find when I receive an email with a more technical request, its far easier to shoot back a Bonjoro then A) Call: here you have to wait for it to ring through and leave a VM, or get embroiled in a longer conversation or B) Spend forever composing a long, itemized email.

And I think that there is a handful of industries that could benefit hugely from this. Just today I was thinking about the fitness industry. What do they do when someone comes in and gets a gym guest pass or inquires about personal training? They bury the person in a million phone calls or maybe send them a handful of emails.

Imagine instead the gym employing a little levity and recording quick videos…. The sales agents could cater the pitch to different demographics, one gym might try a dude benching 300 and then jumping up and calling to the camera “I’ll spot you bro. Let’s do this”. Or Planet Fitness panning around the gym and saying something like, “Notice the distinct lack of meatheads…. That is by design!”. My pitches might need a little finesse but the point is, I am certain that the personal touch would have a higher impact in creating call backs or return customers than the volley of tone-deaf calls.

I am excited to see where this company goes.