How to Build Video Email Automations with Dubb

Have you been wondering how to build video email automations? If so, you are in the right place. In this recap from a Dubb Support video, we are going to take a deep dive into video email automations and how to build video email automations with Dubb. This is a great video and recap post if you are looking to save time and leverage the power of video sales and marketing. If you would like to view the discussion in its entirety, go ahead and click on the play button above.

Whether you are the founder of your startup or are a brand new sales professional at your new organization, you are definitely going to want to invest in video. If you are a common reader of our blog (or viewer of RevShow), you undoubtedly know why we are obsessed with video.

Video, among other things, can help you build closer connections with your clients. It can help you tell amazing stories and help you build trust with your viewer. Most exciting for readers of this blog is that video can help you generate more sales. Whether you are struggling to hit your sales goals or want to take your sales goals to the next level, video can be the tool that gets you to your desired destination.

All of that being said, some sales and marketing professionals choose not to invest in video. Why is this? I think the most obvious excuse is that they don’t have enough time. They think they don’t have enough time to both create compelling video content and distribute those videos to their target audiences.

It is true that we don’t have as much time as we want. Between our responsibilities at work and at home, it can feel like we barely have enough time to make a dent in our to-do lists. At times, it can be overwhelming.

I am here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way. Using a tool like Dubb, you can easily create stunning pieces of content for your audiences. Moreover, you can easily customize those videos so that you are delivering the most personal sales interaction that you can. We have several other blog posts that go into much more detail on how to do this, so I encourage you to check out our blog for more.

In this post, I want to speak about a perhaps underrated, yet extremely effective tool to help you save time with video. Here, I am talking about video email automations. We are going to take a deep dive into this tool, including what video email automations are, how they work on Dubb, and how you can get the most out of them in your sales and marketing work. At the end, you will have a fantastic idea of how you can use video email automations to help you accomplish your sales and marketing goals.

One more thing before we get started. In this post, we are going to spend much of our time talking about how to build video email automations with Dubb. If you already have a Dubb account, we are extremely happy to have you! You will need to go to your Dubb dashboard to get the most from this tutorial. If, on the other hand, you haven’t yet created a Dubb account, I encourage you to do so. You can create your account by clicking here. By registering as a new user, you also get access to a free 14-day trial of our premium plans, so I encourage you to leverage this opportunity.

With this housekeeping out of the way, let’s get into it.

Why Invest in Video Email Automations?

Before discussing the how, I think it is helpful to speak about why video email automations are so powerful. After all, you may have the best idea of how to use Dubb to create video email automations, but if you aren’t seeing how it can supercharge your organization, it becomes much easier to give up or forget.

As you likely know, video email automations are video emails that are automatically sent according to some parameters. These parameters are part of what is called a workflow. You can think of the workflow as a top-down funnel that engages with a target based on where they are in the funnel. For instance, if the target is at the top of the funnel, they will likely get very different video emails than they would if they were at the bottom of the funnel. Video email automations can also incorporate conditional logic (we will discuss this in much more detail below).

Now, let’s talk about the why. Why should you invest time into creating video email automations?

For starters, video email automations can save you time. This is probably the biggest benefit. Yes, it may take some to set up your video email automations and ensure that you are delivering the experience that you want. Once you have done this upfront work, however, you can set your video email automations and let them serve your audience. Even when you are sleeping, you can be confident that your video email automations are providing value to your viewers. It creates some valuable peace of mind and frees up your time so that you can cross off other items on your to-do list.

Beyond simple efficiency and time saving, video email automations can offer a better experience to your viewers. They can consistently deliver the type of experience that you want, whether that is a certain video after a viewer has clicked on a call to action button or a follow up video email if the viewer hasn’t responded in some time. Instead of trying to figure out how to interact with each individual prospect on any given day, you can rely on your automations and outsource that decision to technology. By doing this, you can deliver a valuable, cohesive sales experience and drastically increase the chances that a given prospect converts to a paying customer.

Finally, video email automations provide you with some valuable data. Once you have set up your video email automations and have activated them for your audience, you will start to see how your audience interacts with those automations. Compared to some other video platforms, Dubb gives you extremely granular data on how your viewers are interacting with your videos. Not only can you see whether or not they watched a video, but you can see the percentage of the video that they watched, whether or not they clicked on any of your call to action buttons, and even whether they left an emoji response to your video. Then, with that data in hand, you can create even more relevant and effective video email automations, which can subsequently increase your conversion rates. Pretty great, right?

These are just three of the reasons why video email automation can be so powerful. Whether you are looking for pure efficiency or want to convert more prospects into paying customers, you can do so by investing in this technology.

How to Build Video Email Automations with Dubb

With the why in mind, let’s now move on to discuss the how.

Like I said, to discuss some of the logistics of creating video email automations, you are going to need to go to your Dubb account. Once you do that, go ahead and visit your settings. You can do that by clicking on the Dubb icon on the top right part of your Dubb dashboard. Then, click on the “Your Settings” option.

Customizing Your Settings

From there, you first need to configure your email address so that you can send video emails from Dubb. To do this, you are going to want to visit the “Team” section on the left side of your screen. Then, click on “Configuration.” Once you do this, you will need to type in a physical address so that you are CAN-SPAM compliant.

Next, you will want to visit the “Campaign Settings” tab, where you will configure your email. Click on the “Add New Configuration” button. You will have the choice of selecting email providers. If you are on Gmail, for instance, you can use Gmail’s API. Once you select that, you will see a “Connect with Gmail” option, which will take you to Gmail. If you don’t use Gmail and are using something like an SMTP or SendGrid, for instance, you can select the relevant option. You will then need to enter your credentials in order to connect.

So once you have entered a physical address and have configured your email, you are ready to move on to the next step. This involves setting the privacy of your video to be included in your workflows. For instance, select a video that you already have in your Dubb account (if you don’t already have a video, you can quickly create a sample one using Dubb’s website). Once you do this and are on the video information page, you will want to scroll down to the options section. You will see a line that says “Share with team and allow collaborations.” You will want to make sure that this box is checked. Simple enough.

From there, you are going to want to go back to your Dubb dashboard and visit the “Marketing” tab on the left side of the page. Then, click on the “Automations” subtab. A prerequisite to building a workflow is that you need to have emails that are actually included in that workflow. An example of this is a workflow with several emails in it. There are four emails included in that workflow and a delay separating them. We include the delay because we want to give our recipients time to respond (and we don’t want to spam them within an extremely short period of time). This is just one example of a workflow, and again, you can make them as simple or as complicated as you’d like.

Creating Your Email

With this in mind, let’s go ahead and create a workflow from scratch. What you will want to do is go to the “marketing” tab, then “automation” tab, and then “email tab.” You will find all of this on the left side of your Dubb dashboard. Once you are on this screen, you are going to want to click on the “+ New” button to create a new workflow. On this page, you will have several options in front of you.

The first step is customizing some of your email settings. You will need to input your campaign title. Then, you will see a pulldown menu for the broadcast provider. This involves the email provider that you configured earlier on. If you have several colleagues as part of your email service (which you probably do), you will see their email addresses listed there. Select the email address where you want your emails to be sent from. Then, you are going to want to customize the “from” name and the subject line that your video will have.

Subject line creation is somewhat more complex than many people realize. It is important to think carefully about the subject lines that you are creating for your videos. One important point here, however. Studies have shown that if you simply include the word “video” in the subject line of your email, you are much more likely to have your recipient open the email. It is something small, but it can go a long way in helping you increase your open rates (and subsequently, your conversion rates).

You will also see in the video that we included some interesting text in the sample subject line. Specifically, you will see the text “{{first-name | hi}}, check out this video.” That first part of the subject line ({{first-name | hi}}) is a token. It is pulling data from the contact section of your Dubb dashboard. This can be a great way to personalize your subject lines when you are sending emails automatically. Keep one thing in mind, though. When you are using tokens, make sure that the contact’s information is present on Dubb. Otherwise, Dubb will use the fallback that you provide (which is “hi” in the example above).

Once you have settled on your subject line, you can scroll down and go to the video section. Importantly, only shared emails can be used in automated emails. If you want to mark a video as shared, you will need to visit the video’s specific page and make the appropriate change. Putting this issue aside, in this video section, you will see the videos that you can include in this particular email. Once you find the video that you want to include, simply click on it and you will see a blue frame surrounding that thumbnail. Then, go ahead and click on the next button below.

On this next page, you will be constructing the email itself. You will see two options: Video Header and Email Template. The Video Header is essentially the personalization text that is on top of the video itself. As you can guess, personalization text is a great way to draw your viewer’s attention to your video. If they see that you have taken the time to customize your greeting, they will be much more likely to actually watch your video. With personalization text, we try to keep it simple. Since you only have one line of text, it is helpful to simply include the message “Video for X” (X being the prospect’s name). You can make this line whatever you want, but putting the viewer’s name on this line is recommended.

From there, let’s talk about the Email Template section. You have two choices here. First, you can use the simple editor to design your email. This is offered to you in plain text, and you can make any necessary changes here. For instance, if you want to include a personalization token (like we talked about above), you can do it here. If you make any changes in this section, you will see them automatically appear in the preview of your video email below.

You can also rely on several different templates to design your video emails. At Dubb, we offer plenty of templates like corporate standard, modern white, streamlined, corporate air, punch, pop, and more. You can edit and modify each individual template as you want. As you will see, these templates are slightly different. They offer different colors and a slightly different layout, so feel free to peruse these options and choose the one that most appeals to you.

Note that these templates automatically include your logos, headshots, and other personal branding features. You can modify the text on these pages however you want. Instead of a generic greeting that some of the templates give you, for instance, you can make them much more personalized for specific audience members in your workflows.

Constructing Your Workflow

After selecting a template, you can move on to the next step. This next step is saving this email and using it within an automated workflow. You will want to go back to your Dubb dashboard, click on the “Automation” tab, and then click on the “Workflow” tab. Then, click on the “+ New” button that is on the top right corner of your screen.

There are three steps to creating a workflow: setting up the workflow, building the workflow, and launching the workflow.

In step one, you’re going to want to first name your workflow. You can choose any name you want for the workflow name. Then, you can move on to the trigger section. There are types of triggers that you can select from: tag added and video watched. I usually recommend that you rely on tags. This means that when you add a tag to a contact, your series of emails will be triggered. You can use the video watched trigger. However, you may not have as much control as you would by using the “tag added” trigger. As always, the choice is up to you. In this hypothetical, we are going to use the tag added trigger.

From here, Dubb is going to prompt you to select a condition. The two options are “includes any of” or “includes all of.” For “includes any of,” this means that if any individual in your contacts list includes any tag in the “enter tag” space, those individuals will be enrolled in your workflow. If you were to choose “includes all of,” quite obviously, this would mean that the individual would need to have every single tag in order to be enrolled in your automated workflow. If you turn the automation on and you see a contact isn’t enrolled because they didn’t have that particular tag, you will need to manually add it. Then, the automation will trigger for that individual.

Once you have selected your tags, you can press the “Save & Continue” button and move on to the next page. This is the “build” page and it is where you can actually build your workflows. When you start building your workflow, you will notice that the first item is “workflow triggered.” This is the start of your workflow, and in this case, it is triggered when tags are associated with a contact.

You can customize your workflows from here. You will need to do so by clicking on the “Add Node” button. Once you do this, you will see several options, including “Send Campaign,” “Delay,” “Add Tag,” or “If/Then Branch.” The Send Campaign option lets you send an email. By clicking on that, you will see that you can search through email campaigns that we already created above. You can then click on the relevant email campaign and click on submit. Doing that, you will see that the “Send Campaign” option was added to your overall workflow (right below the Workflow Triggered step). From there, you can add another action.

For instance, “If/Then Branch” lets you select a binary condition. For instance, if Dubb notices that a particular prospect watched a video, they will be branched off to a separate part of the workflow. If they didn’t watch that video, they will veer off to another branch of the workflow. The “Delay” option lets you pause the workflow. You can pause for days, hours, or minutes. The choice is totally up to you. Finally, the “Add Tag” option helps you enroll prospects in a different campaign, take them down a different path, flag them as a significant prospect for you, and more. You can even choose the “Send Campaign” option again and enroll them in a drip sequence, which is a series of emails that are sent to the recipient.

This is essentially how workflow campaigns are built. There are actions and steps in between those actions. Even better, with Dubb, you can make your automated campaigns as simple or as complex as you’d like. Once you are finished constructing your workflow, you can click on the “Save & Continue” button.

The final step is to save or launch your workflow. On this page, you will see a switch that says “Only trigger contacts once.” We recommend that you keep this option switched on, as you don’t want to send the same email to people multiple times. From there, you will want to turn the workflow on (there is a switch for that) and agree to the NO SPAM policy. Finally, you can save the workflow, save it for later, and launch the workflow.

As you can see, there is some upfront work involved in creating automated workflows. You will need to create your actual emails, ensure that you are including tags (if desired) for your contacts, and create the automated workflows as you see fit. However, once you have done this, you can let Dubb’s technology do the heavy lifting for you. You can be confident that you not only delivering value to your audience members, but that you are building trust and getting much closer to a sale.

A Final Point: Mind the Data

This question of how to build video email automations with Dubb is pretty straightforward. Following the steps and advice above, you can get your email automations up and running in no time.

With all of this in mind, I want to wrap up this post by speaking about another important part of creating video email automations with Dubb. Specifically, I am talking about data and analytics. Creating and distributing your workflows is a critical part of getting the value from this technology. However, if you want to take your video email automations to the next level, you are going to want to track your videos and use those insights to create even better video emails and workflows.

Just think about it: whenever you are creating content online and distributing it online, you can get a wealth of information. Dubb in particular offers plenty of data and analytics to show you how your prospects are reacting to your videos. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, this includes things like whether the prospect watched your video, whether they reacted to any of your call to action buttons, and more. Compared to other video platforms that offer some of this data on a broader scale, Dubb offers you granular information. You can see individual viewers’ activity, which helps you better customize your future interactions with them. Not only that, but you can use that data to improve your workflows. If, for instance, you see that a certain part of your workflow is leading to audience churn, you will want to figure out why. From there, make the necessary changes so that audience members can remain in your workflow (and get much closer to a conversion).

In the end, every sales and marketing professional should look at the analytics that their video software provides. Even if you aren’t using Dubb, I encourage you to constantly evaluate this data and use it to improve your prospect and customer interactions. By doing so, you can avoid repeated mistakes, build stronger ties with your audience members, and generate more sales.

Building Your Automations and Leveraging the Power of Video

As you have seen, video email automations can be a true game-changer. You can use video email automations to both save yourself time and create a better experience for your target audience. Along with this, video email automations let you capture valuable data, which you can then use to deliver an even more personalized and valuable experience for your new viewers. The benefits are many, and using a tool like Dubb, you can easily capture all of these benefits for your organization.

So where do we go from here? While it may be easy to simply read this post and move on, I encourage you to be proactive here. Go ahead and open your Dubb account. From there, create a simple video email automation that you can send to a small target audience. Once you do this, wait and receive some of the valuable data that Dubb provides you. With that data in hand, you can both tinker with your already-existing workflow and use that feedback to create even more workflows. While this is a process, it is a process that is certainly worth investing time into. By doing so, you save time in the long run and create a better experience for viewers, audience members, and prospects.

I encourage you to get started today.

At Dubb, we really enjoy thinking about and discussing topics like how to build email video automations. If you have any feedback on this post or have any questions about the topics discussed here, don’t hesitate to contact us. You can also click here to learn more about Dubb and click here for a free 14-day trial of our premium plans.