Prospecting is hard work. We wanted to create a better way to prospect to new clients. Cold email was not working as well as we would have liked. We wanted to send out video emails to prospective clients to give us a warm opening. However, sending video in email is not practical due to the large size of the files. So we decided that sending out animated gifs would be a better idea.
Video emails put a face to a name and make it easier to create genuine connections. There are companies like Bombbomb that offer services like this but in our opinion, they are overpriced.
We thought with a couple of hours we could create something that we could use to prospect clients that works for us and was easily imported into our CRM. We used python’s moviepy library to create the base for our code.
First we created a video on our Android device and transferred all the files to our server(could be setup on a laptop as well or any other computer) and we ran the code.
The code is setup to read a directory and make animated GIFs out of the videos. It takes the first 3 seconds of the video and makes a GIF out of it.
clip = (VideoFileClip(FileName)
.subclip((0,1),(0,3))
.resize(0.3)
.set_duration(3))
It then overlays an image of a play button over the animated GIF with information about the length of the video giving the final image a more polished look.
The GIF is a way to get the attention of the prospect. You can write their name on the whiteboard so that the prospect knows that the message is personal.
We’ve left the script simple but this easily be adjusted to output a CSV for import into a CRM. Or it could add API calls to insert data. The possibilities are endless. Please feel free to use this script or if you would like help using this technology in your own marketing efforts, please contact us.
The script you can download it off of our Github account here.
