Your inbox is typically a pile of mundane annoyance, unsolicited misery, laden with demanding folks prodding you to take action you would rather not be taking. Emails offering real value often slip through the cracks.

Folks these days are busy “drowning in work”, “getting snowed under”, “coming up for air”, and “getting swamped” amid a host of other excuses for just having too much work (read angry birds) and too little time. Global warming has a lot to answer to for these extreme office conditions, but one thing is for sure, when a life raft of happiness in the form of something funny comes by, folks are quick to get on board. Our average response time to funny follow up emails is 18 minutes.

Earlier this year rather than send the same old email… ”hey, just wanted to follow up, touch base, and touch you” we got a wee bit more creative and sent this video.

The result? Instant response…a blog post by the recipient on his own company’s website, a mention on the Salesforce blog and also on Hubspot. The follow-up message has over 2,000 views. By no means astronomically charged viral YouTube gold but about 2,000 more so far than your typical follow-up email. The CEO who received it even build it into some of his keynote talks.

After a one-time, random experiment, Funny follow-up and email quickly became a habit. They now go together like peanut butter and jelly or Steven Seagal and a strong male ponytail. Why? Because *it works…consistently. (*funny follow up and email. Not being a muscular dude and having a pony tail. We don’t encourage that)

When we didn’t hear from Optimizely, (a target client) we sent them a video with similar results. They not only shared the video within their company, but also invited us to speak about humor and conversion at Opticon, their conference.

Sometimes you are so focussed on getting your need met that you forget to add your own personality. We firmly believe humor and bringing a smile to your recipients face makes you stand out from the crowd. Try it and see. Remember people buy from people, and fun people at that.

But first, do you use email marketing to boost your business? If so, you might be interested to learn more about how to sync HubSpot and Mailchimp. Integrating these two applications can help you to manage your customer database more efficiently. Tempted to give it a try? Head to the PieSync website for everything you need to know.

Follow these three simple steps to send your own funny followup video for $25 or less.

Go to Fiverr.com

Select a fun freelancer like these folks

Give them your followup email to read outloud

Wait for the happiest reply you’ve ever received from a follow up

Join us in spreading the humor on #funnyfollowupfridays. Tweet @FunnyBizzSF with your latest video.

If video seems to much effort take a leaf out of Derek Siver’s book and add humor to your emails, as he did to great effect during his time running CD Baby. Read about it here on Tim Ferriss’ blog.

Where you can, add humor. We all need more of it.