At Vocal Video, we believe in shipping new features, design improvements, and bug fixes fast & frequently – we deploy product updates hundreds of times each year. But sometimes, to make a more dramatic improvement, we undertake bigger projects that take longer to come to fruition. We just finished one such project and we’re excited to tell you all about it!
AI-powered video collector creation
Vocal Video has long provided video collector templates to give you a good starting point for your video collectors no matter your use case. But, we can only create a finite number of templates. So we thought “what if you could just describe a project in a sentence or two and AI could create it for you?”
Sounds simple, right? But, there’s actually a lot that goes into creating a great video collector. To do a good job, the AI needs to take into account your brand, have knowledge of what your company actually does, and make it match your specific project description! Here’s just some of what the AI sets up for you:
- Relevant, context-specific questions that will elicit great video responses
- Customized intro and thank-you messages
- A strong public-facing title for your collector
- Invitation and reminder emails with effective subject lines, copy, and calls to action (more on these emails below)
- Your company branding is automatically applied (if your brand kit is already set up it won’t be overridden)
If you’re not sure what kind of AI prompt to write, we provide dozens of starter prompts for all of the use cases we support. For example, here are the sample AI prompts for the “marketing” use case:
Just as with our templates, you can use the AI-generated video collectors as a starting point to save you time – you can share them as-is or make any tweaks you want before sharing (all with an even-better interface – see below). And if you don’t want to create your video collectors with AI, it’s just as easy as it always was to pick a template or start from scratch.
(by the way, if you’re using Vocal Video to screen candidates as part of your hiring process, you can even paste in the whole job description and get a perfectly tailored video collector!)
It was a lot of work for our engineering team, but we’re really happy with the results. Let us know how AI-powered collector setup is working for you!
Send branded video request emails via Vocal Video
Something fundamental about how Vocal Video has always worked is “share a link, get videos”. This has meant that you’ve always had to copy a link (be it a one-size-fits-all link to a video collector, a personalized link for an individual respondent, or a QR code), and then send your own invitation emails.
But, sending good video-request emails that convert isn’t easy! Email design, copywriting, subject lines, list management, reminders, handling bounces and opt-outs – it’s a lot. We have a lot of deep expertise in this domain, so we added it to Vocal Video to make life easier for you.
Now, when your video collector is ready for responses, you’ll see a new “get responses” page with three new options: Send a Video Request, Upload a List, and Automate Video Requests. More on each below.
Sending one-off Video Requests
Want to send a well-designed, branded, and effective video request email to someone? Now you can do it in seconds. Just enter your recipient’s name and email, and click send!
Here are some more details on how it works:
- Your email subject, body, and call-to-action button are customized for you by AI during collector creation. You can override any of these when sending your message, and see a live preview.
- By default, a reminder will go out to people if they haven’t responded within 7 days. You can toggle that on/off and also customize the reminder language.
- Scheduling is built in: set your email to go out now, tomorrow morning, at the start of next week, or anytime you prefer.
- Want to use your own message for multiple recipients? It’s super easy to edit the video collector’s templated first-ask and reminder emails. (you can also edit the “from” name in the email here.)
Sending Video Requests to a List
Sending video requests to a list with Vocal Video is just as easy as sending one-off requests. You’ll need a customer email list in CSV format (any spreadsheet or CRM can export in this format). Upload it, and Vocal Video will automatically identify the columns and map the data to the appropriate fields.
From there, you just preview (and tweak if you want) the first-ask and reminder messages, schedule delivery for now or later, and you’re done!
Automating Video Requests With Integrations
Automating video requests as part of a customer lifecycle or hiring process is one of the best ways to get value out of your Vocal Video investment – once you set it up, you get a steady stream of fresh video content.
Now, it’s easier than ever with triggered video requests. When an event happens in your CRM, ATS, online store – or whatever software you use – you can now easily make Vocal Video send out a video-request email. All the customer/candidate/employee variables you need are passed to Vocal Video and automatically populated into the emails so that each recipient receives a personalized request. Triggered video requests support reminders too!
We have ready-made integrations for over 100 popular apps, and with Zapier, you can set up automated video requests with just about any software platform.
Manage requests and see who’s responded
Want to see who’s responded, who hasn’t, when reminders are scheduled to go out, and maybe reschedule them? We’ve made that super easy with three new dashboards: one for all video requests in your workspace, one for all video requests belonging to a particular collector, and one for each uploaded list.
Generous Video Request Limits
Here are the video request limits for each of our plans:
- Free: up to 50 per month
- Essential: up to 12,000 per year
- Pro: up to 24,000 per year
- Enterprise: custom limits
What about email bounces, opt-outs, etc?
We protect your (and our) email reputation and ensure high deliverability by tracking bounced email addresses, including opt-out links for recipients, and using DKIM verification. We’re email nerds, so you don’t have to be.
To prevent spamming, or just accidentally flooding someone’s inbox, we won’t send another video-request email to someone if they already have an open video request. Keep this in mind if you send test emails to yourself!
A fully redesigned video collector builder
At Vocal Video, we always strive to create the best user experience we can. The video collector creation interface is one of those areas we’ve put a lot of effort into over the years, but we’re never satisfied with “good enough”. With the addition of AI-powered collector creation and video-request emails, we decided it was time for an overhaul.
We’re really proud of the results – with the new wizard panel and streamlined steps, it’s faster & easier to go through the setup process. The redesigned left-hand sidebar makes it easy to go between setup mode and seeing your requests, responses, and more advanced settings. We even managed to free up some screen space so it works better at smaller window sizes, and of course you can still set up, preview, and launch a video collector from your phone!
Questions?
There’s obviously a lot in this product update. Whether you’re new to Vocal Video, or have been with us for years, if you have any questions about the new functionality, let us know!