Video Marketing That Converts

Podcast

In this podcast episode, we talk about Video Marketing That Converts. Marketing with Video and how to build rapport and connection with your audience.  

Join me as I speak to Rashpal Singh of BoxMedia and dig into how to create a strategy and create video content with meaning and context.  We talk about video production and its powerful role in social media, sales and marketing. We talk about the sales process  changing over the past 10 years, scaling video effectively for business, and a 5 point structure that is used to script videos.

Rashpal is a video strategist helping businesses generate awareness, increase revenue, attract and retain employees, operating out of the midlands in the uk. Working as a video producer for more than 30 years, being born into it , Rashpal is highly experienced and well attuned to the ever changing landscape of video. He provides video solutions to small and big, b2b and b2c businesses.

His company, BoxMedia, describe themselves as “a creative video marketing agency that specialises in courageous, visually striking communications for brands. Through our creative strategy process, we surprise and delight audiences both internally and externally. We’re passionate. Dedicated. We love what we do.”

Some of the insights you’ll want to hear about:

  • How to tackle the challenges that come with identifying the audience and their pain points before you even begin filming.
  • Creating attention grabbing videos, using  structures and storytelling as outlined in Rashpal’s 5 step framework
  • The major changes which have occurred in the last 20 years in the sales and buying process.
  • Marketing tips that help you stand out against competitors.
  • The powerful ways of making cold calling emails more warmer.
  • How video helps b2b companies save time and money in the recruiting process.
  • The ways automation and scaling is used for video in marketing campaigns.

Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

“Think of YouTube or a library. You know, you go to the library to learn something, to do a deep dive, study something, and you want to come away with that, you know, that knowledge base and that value. You go to Facebook, like a bar, you go there, casual browsing, you’re looking, you’re searching, just like you would in maybe a bar or a restaurant. You’re going go there with friends. You’re in a casual environment. You’re not really thinking about business, but you are in that casual environment. And think of Google, like ppc, like a supermarket. You know, you don’t really chill in a supermarket, but you go to a supermarket with a very specific intention. You’ve got intent and need to buy something. You know exactly what you want to buy. You want to go to the supermarket and buy it.”

“I strongly believe in a thousand true fans then a hundred thousand people that just follow. So, the difference is there and, and marketing gurus like Seth Godin and other people like that swear by this. And it’s proved successful for us. If there’s not a fit, if we don’t align and great with each other, it’s probably better that we don’t connect and we just keep our distance. If there is a fit, even if not a need, but the synergies are there, let’s keep in touch. That’s the kind of approach we have. And relationship is, for me, the most important part. Trying to sell something to somebody is not for me. I would rather educate them and when the time is right, they’ll buy from me.”

“That’s the biggest shift that we’ve seen over the years with regards to buying trends. Thinking once again about the audience, our customers first; the buying trends have radically changed. So when we are talking now to businesses, and if it’s around the sales and marketing point of view, how can you make yourself stand out from the rest of the crowd? So that leads into the point you were sharing is about lead with education, lead with knowledge. And that’s what we do. If anybody wants to use and leverage video, it’s not a question about why, everybody knows why. It’s on every channel. It’s everywhere. It’s easy to digest, everybody gets it. Now the question is how, how do we do this at scale? Not making one or two videos, but a hundred videos over the next 12 months. People need to understand how can we do this strategically, consistently, sustainably and making sure that all content is on brand, is consistent, and it actually builds on business.”

Transcript

Jatinder : Welcome everybody to Digital Rapport Podcast. I’m Jatinder Palaha. And on today’s episode, we have Rashpal Singh of Box Media. Welcome, Rashpal.

Rashpal : Thank you, Jatinder. Thanks for having me here on your podcast.

Jatinder : Fantastic, man. I’m super excited to chat to you. I love talking to experts in industry around a particular topic. Your expertise is around video and you’ve been in video for a very long time. I’ve seen your content. It’s fantastic, so I thought it’d be really cool if we can pick your brains and have conversations around how you’re using video to connect with your audience and any kind of insights you can give to the viewers and listeners on how they can utilise video to actually connect better with the audience as well. How long have you been making video content for?

Rashpal : Fantastic. Firstly, I’m honoured to be on the podcast. It was very kind of you to give me such a great intro. I’ve been in this video space since I was born. I’ve been around video. Dad had a video business and I’ve been born into that. He was doing a mixture of corporates and weddings, and that taught me a lot. It taught me a lot about confidence, how to connect with people before the technicalities of video. I think that’s an absolute key aspect with the world of communications marketing. Then, depending on which direction you go, audio, radio, seo, or a different kind of channel. But it’s definitely been invaluable for my initial video knowledge base and learning.

Jatinder : That’s fantastic. This is one of the things, like you’re saying, you’ve been in video because your parents were in it; your dad was doing these things. You followed through, you listened, you learned to learn. So you’ve got years and years of experience. And that’s what makes these conversations valuable because it’s not like someone who’s just done it in a year. This is someone who’s been around for a very long time.

Rashpal : Without giving my age away, absolutely, we’ve been going a long time [laughs].

Jatinder : Age is just a number, right? It’s the skills that you bring to the table, which is across age groups. So in that place it’s a good thing. So, let’s get into it. When a company approaches you or a person approaches you,  you’re going to start creating videos for them. Where do you start? What are you doing? How’s that process go?

Rashpal : Great question, thanks for that. The starting point is always, “what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve?” That’s our initial starting point because if we’re unclear about the problem, we can’t build a strategy around fixing that problem. And we don’t know what kind of video we need to create that will help to take the minds and hearts forward from every perspective to fix that problem. So, starting point is: what’s the problem? Once we understand the problem, then we can start to think about the second thing, the most important thing, is the audience. Depending on who that audience, that demographic is, then we can start to think about the third thing, “how do we package this video to make sure that we connect with that audience?” 

So then beyond that, we can drill down about how many touch points do we need; is this communication going to be one piece of video, 10 pieces of video, a hundred pieces of video, and whatever we feel will fit and we work together with our clients to work out: “will that produce the results that we’re looking for on the other end? “So a video on its own is just a bit of a blunt tool. And what we need to do is to understand the problem, our audience. And then when we start to craft the actual video, we need to understand context as well. So we know our audience. We need to think about where are they going be consuming this content? Is it at : home, tv, cinema, social? If it’s on social which channel: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok. There’s loads of channels, and is it on the website as well.

And each channel, each platform, each space, people are on there for different reasons, and we need to disrupt them, our audience, on whatever channel they’re on, grab their attention using this content, using the medium of video. Then, once again, depending on where it is, educate them with regards to whatever the message is. That might be just a bit of a teaser, piece of thought leadership, to take them to the next stage. Nine times out of 10 it’s never one piece of content. It’s always a number of pieces of content, but that’s aligned to how big is the problem. If it’s a small problem, it’s easier. If it’s a bigger problem, it’s a bit more complex.

Jatinder : Definitely. What you shared there about context and message is very important. It’s similar to when we do web work or anything online with funnels and stuff; people create whatever, they put it out there, but there’s no context to what they’re trying to do. What is it, what message are they actually trying to get across. Or how they’re trying to resonate with our audience, right? So, let’s talk a bit about that. What kind of things can people do in order to resonate with the audience?

Rashpal : Yes, it’s a great thing. What I try to explain, the analogy that really works for me, years and years ago, to get that context right, is think of YouTube like a library. You go to the library to learn something, to do a deep dive, study something, and you want to come away with that knowledge base and that value. You go to Facebook, treat it like a bar. You go there, casual browsing, you’re looking, you’re searching, just like you would maybe a bar or a restaurant. You’re going go there with friends. You’re in a casual environment, you’re not really thinking about business, but you are in that casual environment. And think of Google, like ppc, like a supermarket. You don’t really chill in a supermarket, but you go to a supermarket with a very specific intention. You’ve got intent, “I need to buy something”. You know exactly what you want to buy. You want to go to the supermarket and buy it. So with that in mind, with that backdrop in place, then you can start to think about, well, the intent of your audience at these different places, at the supermarket, in the library, at a bar or restaurant, they’re going to be doing different things. So you can’t just try to have one piece of content and shove it down all them different channels because people are gonna engage and interact in different ways. 

Yourself as a digital expert, you’ll know the PPC or the Google intent is very different to the intent that you get on Facebook or any of the other social channels. With all of that in mind, it helps us to think about, well, if someone’s come down the PPC route, someone’s done a search, they click a link, they get to a landing page, we can be a lot more specific and direct with that message, getting straight to the pain point and the solution because we know the intent is much closer to a buying decision, or a sales qualified position, compared to what we might say on the other channels, [which] will be a marketing qualified position. And TikTok is another channel, which is different to Facebook.

The thing with YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and all the others that come in the realm, and so Google is a little bit different because the intent is much higher, is that people are looking for either education or entertainment. So you’ve got to think about if you need to grab your audience’s attention. How can you use education or entertainment to grab their attention and get them to watch a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. We normally say, the first three seconds buys you the next 10. The next 10 buys you the next 10 after that. If you can’t grab them in the first three seconds, there’s no chance of actually getting them to the end of that piece, to the call – to – action, to the next step. 

So what really frustrates me with a lot of content that we see, is you click on a video and the first 10 seconds is the brand logo. And it’s like 10 seconds, which feels like forever in the world we live in today. In the first three seconds, you want get straight to the pain point, or in that first 10 seconds, you want to communicate that punchline. What is somebody going to learn from watching this content and then move into the body of the actual message.

Jatinder : Yeah, that’s fantastic. That thing you’re sharing there about the intention, that’s the thing with the online world, right? It’s almost like a binary thing because people are going on there for a certain purpose. When you were talking earlier about what the intention is. Is it education they’re looking for? What is the buyer intent? Is it how to have information, all of that kind of stuff, jump into the mind of the prospect, isn’t it? What are they looking for and what are the hook points you’re going be able to create, which you can use then to create these attention grabbing kind of headlines or conversations; the bits that grab them and grab their attention, right?

Rashpal : Absolutely. I’ve got an ebook, which I’m happy to share with you and the viewers, and you can put it in your notes for anybody that wants to download, it’s free of charge. In there, I talk about storytelling and the structure of storytelling, and we work around a framework of five Cs. And the five Cs are cold, context, content, conclusion, and then call to action. So right up in that first 10 seconds, you’ve seen that video, it’s grabbed your attention. But in that first section, that cold part, you want to get straight to that teaser, straight to the value proposition on, “this is what I’m gonna learn from this piece”. Once you get past that, you need to get context. 

For argument sake, let’s say there’s a huge pharmaceutical business, they’re bringing some innovation around sustainability, and they need to educate their workforce about new systems and processes that are getting implemented into the business. Well, to grab their attention, they need to start with that cold teaser, that hook, that will actually grab their attention that this is worth watching. Once they get past that into the context part, they need to, step back, “this is the context, this is the landscape, this is where we are, this is where we need to get to”. 

You grasp the bigger picture. Then you move into the content, which is the actual cold message, what we’re gonna learn and the detail of the messaging and then the conclusion, basically a summary of what we’ve discovered. And then the most important thing, which often gets looked over, is the call to action. What do we need our audience to do next? Is click here, is it subscribe? Does it go to another website? Is it go to their website? It depends where that piece of content is. Is it on social? Is it on a website? Is it elsewhere? And what are the next steps?

Jatinder : Yeah, absolutely. It’s a similar process with web as well. When you land on a website, what we say and what people don’t realise is: what is it? Who is it for? What do they get? And the social proof. Those kinds of things on a website have to be presented. In the same way you’ve given a framework there for video, which is I think is fantastic, there’s some good, good insights there. You’re right, because most of the time when you create content, you put it out there, if it’s going out on the social channels, there is that element of a cold market. So what’s going be utilised to hook that cold market? Then slowly, slowly, how are you warming them up? The context is very important because they ask that question, “why? why am I going listen to your video?” [Rashpal]: So what? [Laughs] [Jatinder]:Exactly. You’re so right in regards to that kind of format on that. I think it’s very important for people to look a lot deeper into what they’re trying to achieve with the video.

Rashpal : Absolutely. You say a really important word there, deeper, because video on the surface, look, everyone’s got a smartphone in their pocket. Everyone knows somebody who’s got a decent camera. For many good reasons, there’s a lot of production companies out there, whether they’re small or large; it’s an appreciating space and it’s an appreciating industry that’s already growing and there’s going be more demand for this kind of thing. What we want to do is, well, firstly, celebrate when any business starts to use video. With every production company, I think in the market as well, we want to actually collaborate and support them. We don’t want to look at another production company, “oh, you’re stepping on my territory, you’re stepping on my toes” or vice versa. It’s such a big market and we were of the mindset, “there’s enough business for everybody.”

That’s our starting point. The biggest piece for us is, and where we specialise in because video is such a wide space just like digital marketing, such as website building and other areas, we really hone in onto b2b marketing or communications, so to say. So, we often say using video, we fix business problems. Then business problems could be in sales and marketing, on the new business development side of things. Or they could be around the employee experience: how to attract new employees, how to retain good employees, and how to keep them well engaged. You are getting the best out of your workforce, and in that whole area from sales and marketing, right through to that employee experience piece, video can play such a huge role in so many areas, so many facets that we just want to kind of hone into understanding what the problem is. Then we can, from our library of work, in our experience, start to kind of explain how video can play a role to fix that gap, improve the performance, and generate more results.

Jatinder : Mm-hmm, absolutely, man. It’s so important to know and understand, what you’re about, what you bring to the table. If you look at us guys, when we are working with businesses, one thing is that we have to figure out who the businesses are that we want work with but then you go further into that, when you help the business out, understand who they want to work with, who their target audience is. So there’s, for us guys anyway, in our work that we do, which is to jump into the client’s shoes and then help the them figure out who their clients are, right?

Rashpal : Well, it’s like a double layer of coaching, isn’t it? We’ve got to coach our clients and be clear on ourselves, who are we serving first. Then we can assist and guide our clients and how they serve their customer. What I found is that’s always played to our positives, our strengths, because I then say to our customers, in the same way you found us and we’ve resonated and connected, now I can illustrate our solutions. This is the way we should pave this forwards for you and your customers; it just makes perfect sense.

Jatinder : It’s lead by example, isn’t it? You’re walking the talk actually, you’re doing it yourself. You’re doing it for other people. I think that’s very key because you know how it is on the internet. You can create anything, right? You can create a video or a blog post that says, “here’s X, Y, z, how they’re made 20 K in five minutes online. You can do the same”. But they never explain so hang on a minute, what’s behind this? The depths you have to go into, all this strategy and structure work, is the foundations of everything because if you don’t get that bit right, you’re never going to be able to do the other other side of it.

Rashpal : Of course, yeah, I totally agree. You’ve got to get the foundations in place.

Jatinder: Exactly. You were sharing earlier on, about your message resonating with people and having the abundant approach. You’re right. We met online somehow. We spoke about it on your podcast, how we met online. Then the other fascinating thing is, you are up north in Leeds, I’m based in London. We’re talking to each other through video. We’re building this rapport and communication so that, funnily enough, we haven’t actually met in person, but when we do, I’m sure this is going add to that experience of it, right? What I wanted to get to is that it’s your message, the way you come across, your resonance, your connection with other people that actually gets the business for you at the end of the day as well, with anyone really, right? Sometimes people might get scared thinking, “oh if I share this information and knowledge, they might run away with it”. The reality is people do business with people. It’s your connection for people connecting with you, isn’t it? The idea is that when you do videos, you’re trying to get yourself, your personality, across.

Rashpal : A hundred percent. So the landscape, and you’ll be testament to this, of the last 20 years has changed so much. Back in the day, and once again I speak from a B2B point of view, we’ve done videos in other areas: b2c, private and other things but over the last 15, 20 years, we’ve really found that our strengths are in this B2B space. What we observed and learned was, 15, 20, even 10 years ago, the strength, the value was in the salesperson. When you needed something, you contacted a local supplier,  pick up the phone, speak to them, and rely on them to transfer the knowledge from them to you. You might have two or three people like that.

Then you assess between one versus the other, and make a buying decision. It’s kind of given to you on a plate. Nowadays, I don’t know the exact stats and you might, all of that buying decision is already done online. The only time you’re speaking to a sales person now is when you’re ready to buy. You’re not asking them for any guidance or help. All you want now, when you’re getting in touch with them in this day and age, is just to do the transaction. So that means the landscape has moved in such a radical way. That first research and development part of, “should I invest in this? Should I look at this product or service?”, people are doing it online. So you Google something, you see something, you read something, you download a pdf and that’s all good.

For a lot of people, they do prefer reading. There’s absolutely a place, and there’ll always be a place to have the written word and have the opportunity to download something, a pdf of some nature. You can go away, leave it on your desk, boss’s desk or colleague’s desk and digest that. But the gaps between you getting onto Google and doing a search and going through social channels, getting to a website and digesting it to accelerate that process of passing education and the learning from whoever’s selling a service to the potential buyer can be accelerated if you can actually deliver that same knowledge via video. If a picture tells you a thousand words, what can video tell you? You can get a full 360 of the product, of the service, what it looks like, what it feels like, and with the emotional effect that storytelling can create, it’s more powerful than just text on screen.

So that’s the biggest shift that we’ve seen over the years with regards to buying trends. Thinking once again about the audience, our customers first; the buying trends have radically changed. So when we are talking now to businesses, and if it’s around the sales and marketing point of view, “how can you make yourself stand out from the rest of the crowd”? So that leads into the point you were sharing about lead with education, with knowledge, and that’s what we do. If anybody wants to use and leverage video, it’s not a question about why, everybody knows why. It’s on every channel. It’s everywhere. It’s easy to digest, everybody gets it. Now the question is how, how do we do this at scale? Not making one or two videos, but a hundred videos over the next 12 months. People need to understand how can we do this strategically, consistently, sustainably and making sure that all content is on brand, consistent, and  actually builds on business.

Jatinder : Absolutely. If you’re not creating that content, which is needed as that does guide people. Especially with video, as you said, it’s one of those things that can automate your whole process as well. So you can have, like you said, the story or a presentation going on, and things like repetitive tasks, for example, can be put into video format, right? When somebody approaches you, just say, “oh, watch this. That’ll give you everything you need to know.” If you’ve nailed the presentation, or the storytelling answered all the questions and objections they might have, like you said, it then just makes things a bit easier. They just want to talk to somebody; “Is someone actually on the other side who’s going to be able to help and support me through this”, right?

Rashpal : Hundred percent. So the businesses that we really get excited with working are mature businesses. Mature because they’ve been around for a while and they’ve got money, which always helps, but they want to be a bit radical, they want to think out of the box. That gives us an opportunity to first spend a lot of time with the sales team and the business owners to say, out of the hundreds of conversations you’ve had today, from all the feedback that you might have caught online in different channels, where are and what are the pain points? Once we understand what the pain points are, we can start to build a narrative around the pain points and package that in a video or a number of videos. Then what tends to happen with that content is you’ve got clear, consistent communication going across to your customers and prospects but also your internal teams.

So you’ve got a new starter. They don’t have to learn it with a long slog, they can watch the same content prospects are watching, they can see the same content that your colleagues are watching, and they can quickly learn the narrative, the details of why is it one over the other and why don’t we do this because of X, Y, and Z. It improves and speeds up the whole learning process. So clear, consistent communication wherever you need to say the same thing again and again, video plays a perfect role there. The other point that you touched on about automation. For us, personalisation and automation play a huge role in some of the campaigns that we deliver. Out of everything we do, we get involved with a lot of social media.

We get involved with a lot of cold email outreach. We get involved with a lot of internal communications. It doesn’t matter in which area you might be wanting to use video. There isn’t anybody on this earth that wants to feel like, “is he talking to me or is he just talking to anyone random?” Everybody wants to feel like, “they’re speaking specifically to me”. I’m speaking specifically to you. Then you feel, “I value this conversation” and vice versa. So the reason I say that, the importance of personalisation, of automation, has been abused over time because suddenly you get loads of blanket emails, cold emails, communication, which just feels like, “I’m just another number”, or this wasn’t meant for me. Just like junk mail. What we do in all our campaigns is we hyper personalise and hyper focus on automation.

All of our cold email campaigns that we send out beyond the names and the company names is a given. What we want to do is, in the first line of a cold email sequence, put an icebreaker in, how do I know you? What is that third party piece of information that will actually glue that to you and me together? As we’ve got some mutual interest, there’s a bit of an icebreaker. Then we move into an opportunity to say, “click here to watch a video”. On that click here thumbnail we can personalise that image as well, as opposed to having just a generic image we can have it with your name in the image or something specific in the image. That gives a great level of personalisation that the recipient thinks, “wow, this person’s gone out of their way”.

This isn’t an email that could have been sent to, never mind a hundred other people or a thousand other people, one other person because the icebreaker resonates with only me and that personalised image is my name.” And yeah, there might be a few hundred Jatinders and a few hundred Rashpals and a few hundred Johns and Sarahs but all of that, when put together has a compounding effect, that this feels super personalised. Then with the strategy or tactics of clever automation, it’s amazing how much of a strong effect that has on the campaign results.

Jatinder : Yeah, absolutely, man. It’s like you said about the automation. We’re moving now into the space where the automation, the advanced computer learning, AI, they’re referring to ai when meaning advance computing as AI’s way advanced then that but it’s advanced computing, right? Which is able to be used in creating workflows and flows on how those touch points take place. It’s what something you said which is important is that the human touch points are important as well. If you are going to create an automation, that’s good, but where are the human touch points because that’s essentially what it is. It’s like you say, you don’t want to feel like just a number, but what can be done and put into place where you do talk to the actual human.

So, video encourages that. We know that with video, you get that feeling but then the call – to – action will be, “give us a call. One of our people will speak to you to answer any questions that we haven’t already.” As you were sharing all of that, earlier  you said about how you create analogies: the different supermarket, the bar, that’s a really good insight into where you’re putting your content out there, right? That’s quite important, you’ve identified your audience, you’ve seen what their pain points are. Now you’ve also identified where they’re hanging out; “where do we actually need to go for this solution to be presented to the people with those problems.”

The supermarket analogy is quite good. It’s good for people to know that because you could be on a different platform, but why are you on that platform, right? What are you trying to do on that platform? A lot of people, unfortunately, just create content, put it out there; you get someone who’s just randomly open up their phone, they’re in that gym, just jogging away on the running machine. You’re like, “I don’t wanna see you exercise!” <Laugh>. What’s the point of that? Unless, it was designed to be for that person, but you know what I mean? There’s some content out there which has got no meaning, no thought behind it, it’s just a person venting, frustrating or getting something out there, which is something to be careful of. We’re not saying there’s not a place for that stuff but does it fit in your marketing?

Rashpal : You’ve got to be conscious of everything. When you go out networking, you don’t go in a pair of shorts and just a t-shirt, you dress to network in a suit or smart casual, depending on your style and flavour is. But it’s still in context. So if you’re putting content out online, it should be in line with your brand. What’s your tone of voice, what [are] your brand guides, what should you be saying? What shouldn’t you be saying? This is all really valuable stuff to make sure that you attract the right people to your brand and disqualify the wrong people as well. From a recruitment point of view, it’s huge. We make a lot of brand films for recruitment and it’s incredible. The kind of overview or the sentiment [we receive] back is, “well, we’re getting less candidates applying”. You would think that’s a negative, but [then] they realise the quality of candidates applying are much higher.

That’s a huge improvement because then down the line there’s going to be less churn in the business. Quite often people don’t understand. “Why do I need a film? Why do I need a video for HR improvement?”, but then you explain the reason. We work with a bus and train company, 17,000 employees up and down the country in the UK, in the US they’re a much bigger business, but here the churn rate is quite high. So the value of getting content out there to track the right kind of people to show what that business feels like, looks like, straight away to disqualify the wrong people, qualify the right people. Then as they join the business’s induction content, they can understand what the values of that business mean. Once you pass the induction part, there’s ongoing engagement. Video can play such a powerful role in helping somebody on their journey when joining a new company.

Jatinder : That’s so important, the whole filtering process. Like we said before about online there is that kind of binary element because if someone arrives on a landing page, let’s say if that headlight doesn’t resonate with them, they might not go any further. Same with video, right? If that initial bit doesn’t resonate with the right type of person, they’ll be thinking, “okay, this might not be for me” and they move on. We get rid of all, not junk, but people who are not relevant for that situation or scenario, right? Then the people who resonate for that message, if done properly, as you explained before, they’re then drawn towards it. You’re building the initial connection to build a deeper rapport with them so then you can actually get them, so these are the right type of people.

As you said, it’s so important because a lot of people think they need the numbers. How many people have massive followings on social media platforms but when you look at the conversion rates on the percentage of people that actually click through, it’s crazy. I’ll give you a stat. We did this a couple of years ago. We worked with a email marketing company, one of the biggest buyers and sellers of databases in the UK. They did a mail out for us to a million people and this is a cold email that went out to a million people, right? Any idea what kind of numbers came through?

Rashpal : The average open rate, if they’re getting 20%, that’s really good. And if they’re getting a click through rate of around, I’m thinking 2%, 1.5%, they’re doing pretty good.

Jatinder : You pretty much nailed there. I mean, this is how we come up with industry averages because these companies that do the data, they’re putting out to a million, they are then tracking the numbers to see how many people opened it, how many people read the message, how many people clicked through? I think it was something like 300 people opened it. There was around 30 people that actually clicked through, right? [Rashpal]: A million? [Jatinder]: It was was a cold called email but basically the numbers at the end worked out to about one to three percent, kind of who bought the end product. I can’t remember what the product was as we did this several years ago but that’s how people determine industry averages. 

When you look at somebody who’s got a massive following on YouTube or Twitter, if you look at the numbers that actually click through, it might not make sense and people might not understand, and they think the more they’ve got, as a conversion it can work out better, but if they’re not the right type of people, you can do just as well a with a hundred people as you can with a thousand people, if the right people are in your pipeline.

Rashpal : I strongly believe in and rather have a thousand true fans than a hundred thousand people that just follow. The difference is there and marketing gurus like Seth Godin and other people like that swear by this. It’s proved successful for us. If there’s no fit, if we don’t align and are great for each other, it’s probably better that we don’t connect and just keep our distance. If there’s a fit, even if not a need, but the synergy’s there, let’s keep in touch. That’s the kind of approach we have. Relationship for me is the most important part. Trying to sell something to somebody is not for me. I would rather educate them and when the time is right, they’ll buy from me.

Jatinder : Mm-hmm, absolutely. That’s what it is, at the end of the day, what we’re referring to as, “Digital Rapport”, you’re building that connection with people just as you would in a networking event. You’re getting to know people and if there’s something you can help people with, and if they’ve got that communication, they’re naturally going to gravitate towards you because they know you’re authentic, being helpful, and you can actually help them.

Rashpal : We’ve got no ulterior motive. If somebody wants just some help and advice, like I said, we’ve got free e-books that people can download. They can get in touch with you or share my details on your podcast.

Jatinder : If somebody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Rashpal : Jump onto the website or drop me an email. It’s rashpal@boxmedia.tv and just say what’s the problem. Even if you don’t want to tell me a problem, that’s absolutely fine. Just say you want the ebook, I’ll be delighted to share it with you and if you’ve got any questions about that, how to use it, how to implement it; we’re not even precious that we need to implement that. If you can implement it yourself, happy days, get on with it, and I wish you lots of success.

Jatinder : Absolutely, and Rashpal, on that note, I think we’re going to sign out because I know we are a bit tight on time schedules today. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and information and hope to do it again sometime soon. Thank you very much.

Rashpal : Once again, thanks for having me, and I’d be delighted to come again, drop me an email or give us a shout. I’d be delighted to jump on another call with you.

Jatinder : Thank you. There you go folks, another Digital Rapport Podcast. Signing out until the next one. Thank you very much.

Guest: Rashpal Singh – https://boxmedia.tv

Host: Jatinder Palaha – https://www.jatinderpalaha.com

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