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How to effectively use a founder story in your email & sms channels

Harris Gani
Harris Gani

I see a lot of DTC e-comm brands lean into founder origin stories to build a unique and memorable brand. However, I’m rarely impressed with how brands do this and I think there’s a lot of low hanging fruit…

I typically see an email/SMS with plain text of the founder explaining “This is why I started the brand…”. Communicating a founding story is far more memorable when done via video, but these videos live exclusively on social platforms…and die a few days after being posted. Brands should make these videos more evergreen in their email/sms flows.

When you have people like LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Venus Williams as the face of your brand - why isn’t that video content built into the brand’s email/sms strategy?

I spoke to dozens of e-comm email/sms marketers and found they have poor solutions to show video in email/sms channels. The most common solution I heard was linking to YouTube or Instagram because it’s too costly & time-consuming to build dedicated landing pages (LPs) with a good video experience for email/sms channels.

Linking to YouTube or Instagram is a pretty under-optimized way to show video for a few reasons:

1. The buyer will likely see a competitor’s preroll ad on YouTube before a brand’s content shows - yikes!

2. Social platform algorithms take buyers away from branded content

3. Can’t feature products and checkout within videos on all social platforms

4. Zero visibility and ownership on engagement/watch metrics. This blocks event-based segmentation to retarget user cohorts (example: users who watched 75% of a specific video featuring a product)

We built our personalized video LPs to solve this. Brands create beautiful LPs with us in <20min for their email/sms traffic to show videos in an engaging UI that (1) keeps buyers on-site and (2) was designed to convert.

In 12min, I made this video LP for Venus Williams’ protein brand, Happy Viking, to use in their email/sms flows. Imagine clicking an SMS/email and landing on this. This is far more likely to leave a memorable impression than a plain text email.