Airchalk lets you send out personalized videos via e-mail to a contact list that you upload as a spreadsheet.
1) When you first login or click the ‘create Video’ menu on the left, you’ll see a screen like this:
Please enter in the following:
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the subject line of your e-mail in the first text box
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the body of your email in the second box. You can use templates here, where each variable wrapped in brackets like “{first_name}” will be replaced by the value of the ‘first_name’ column in your spreadsheet for each contact. Be sure to also add in a placeholder for “{video}”, which is where the video will be inserted.
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In the third text box, enter in the words you’d like your video’s actor to speak. Again, you can use variables here from your spreadsheet like “{first_name}”, etc. Your text should be short enough that it will be less than a minute in length when spoken.
2) Click the ‘Next’ button which will then ask you to upload a spreadsheet in CSV format:
Please enter a name for the list (like today’s date), then click the attachment icon to select your spreadsheet file. If your spreadsheet is in Excel format or in Google sheets, please export it to CSV format:
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in Excel, Go to File > Save As, choose the file format for the worksheet as CSV (Comma delimited), then click Save.
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In Google Sheets, go to the File menu → Downloads → Comma Separated Values (.csv)
3) After the file is uploaded, you will be asked to upload a selfie photo of yourself (or whoever you would like to be the speaker in the video). If you do not have a photo, you can create one using a description of the person using the text box on the right.
Your selfie should include your entire head and at least your upper body. We will automatically crop it if necessary.
4) Finally, you will be asked whether you’d like to send a test e-mail to yourself, or to all the contacts in your list. We recommend first sending a test e-mail to yourself to verify that everything looks good.
Please note that if you send a test e-mail to yourself via your Gmail account, because of how Gmail skips certain steps if you send yourself an e-mail, the video will not automatically play on desktop browsers, so we recommend viewing it in the Gmail mobile app (rest assured the videos will play automatically when you e-mail others who view it in Gmail on desktop).
If you send to all the contacts in your list, we will start generating a video for each contact and sending the e-mail on our server; you can close the app if you’d like.
After you’ve setup your first template, if you’d like to send more e-mails with new contacts, you can click on the ‘Templates’ menu on the left side, select your template, and upload a new list to send to.