Visual content, including video, plays a major role in digital media marketing campaigns — including email marketing — and that’s only growing. Our global society has moved from reading text to watching videos.
The pros and cons of this have been discussed at length. However, what is pertinent here is that, as a marketing strategist, you should embrace the latest trends and use them to increase sales for your product and brand.
According to research from Forrester, including video in an email marketing campaign increases the click-through rate by 200%-300%. In this post, I’ll cover best practices for video email marketing, including how to email video and ways to integrate email video marketing seamlessly into your overall digital media strategy.
What Is Email Marketing?
To start us off, here’s a simple definition of email marketing.
Targeting consumers through email, often throughout the customer journey and associated with data mining
It’s interesting to note that, in spite of the rise in spam, email marketing still remains one of the most important and successful ways of reaching consumers and converting them into returning customers. Yes — even in the age of social media. The global email marketing market is worth $7.5 billion and predicted to more than double in less than a decade.
A typical email marketing scenario starts with a company building an email list of established and prospective customers.
This can be a challenge because of the rise in spam emails. Most internet service providers use powerful spam filters to reduce the percentage of ubiquitous, unsolicited emails from reaching their clients.
This makes it difficult for companies to send bona-fide marketing emails to all of the email addresses on their list. Nonetheless, they try. Brands continue to send newsletters and marketing emails to those for whom they have data. Around 80% of marketers would rather give up social media than email marketing.
What Is Video Marketing?
The term video marketing denotes the use of video content — from short promotional films to live-streaming events — as part of your digital media marketing strategy.
And video can be used for nearly anything, whether it’s a product launch, like in the video below, or a rebranding campaign or even customer service, which can aid in retention.
There are many ways to leverage video distribution, from websites to apps. Beyond channels you own, like your website, you can choose from a range of video platforms to host content, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram and Facebook.
These offer additional avenues you can use to promote your brand or product effectively. The next step is to adapt this marketing strategy to your email campaigns as well.
Email Meets Video Marketing
Videos in email marketing can be a strong and effective tool for a variety of marketing goals, including brand awareness, engagement and conversions.
Videos can catch peoples’ attention faster than any other medium, and they enable brands to tell a story in a visual and emotional way, thus creating a positive perception of the brand.
Tips for Videos in Email Marketing Campaigns
Ready to integrate video into your email marketing strategy? If you’re creating video content, it makes sense to scale your video marketing strategy to include email. You already have the content. Now, it’s just sending it out to your audience.
Email is one of the most common platforms our clients use to distribute their Personalized Videos. Here are some best practices you’ll want to adhere to.
Plan Your Content
Create a content plan based on your marketing goals and your target audience. Consider resources you have available to produce content before you establish a calendar. For newsletters, in particular, it helps to send them at regular intervals so your subscribers learn to expect them.
Need inspiration? Sign up for your competitors’ newsletters. You can keep an eye on what they’re doing and you might get some good ideas.
Opt for Quality Content
Make sure the videos you’re emailing customers are unique, visually appealing and match your brand’s visual identity. This doesn’t mean you need a huge production budget. We’ve had clients use our video personalization platform and achieve great results with repurposed creative and even video made from templates.
When it comes to video email marketing, the importance of quality is about relevance and value. What you’re asking customers to watch should be something that will help them — help them learn about a product, take advantage of loyalty rewards they might miss out on, understand a complicated process like mortgages.
Video can do all of that. You just need to use it strategically.
Choose the Right Video Length
The ideal video length varies depending on the audience and the subject.
In general, for email marketing, shorter is better. Many of your readers will be opening the email on their phone (check your email metrics to confirm) and won’t be expecting to spend a long time with your email.
As you can see from the personalized marketing video below, you can say a lot in under a minute.
If you have a lot of content to cover, consider creating a series of videos to keep viewers engaged and avoid content fatigue.
Optimize Your Email Subject Line
This one is simple. Include the word “video” in the email subject line. This gets recipients excited about what’s inside and encourages them to open your email and watch the video.
It’s also a great way to stand out in someone’s inbox. Check the promotional emails you subscribe to. Most companies still don’t use video in emails, so it offers users something a little different from the norm.
Include a CTA
Add a clear call to action at the end of the video. You might put it on the video landing page underneath the video or at the bottom of the email.
You can even include it in your interactive video, thanks to the power of Living Video technology. This can be a button that links to your site, clickable elements shoppers can browse and much more.
Personalize Your Video
Customers love seeing their name in a video. It’s a little bit magical to hear an animated character or even an actor in a short film say your name.
But personalization is more than just a name. Include relevant scenes and data for that audience. We have a whole host of personalized and engaging video marketing examples in our gallery. Check it out for some creative ideas.
Use Thumbnails
If you’re wondering how you can email videos to your customers using any common email marketing platform like Mailchimp or HubSpot, the answer isn’t a 50 MB video attachment. And you don’t need special video email software either.
Simply embed a thumbnail of the video with the play icon in your email. Users can click the embedded thumbnail to be taken directly to a landing page that plays the video.
Tip: If you’ve personalized your video, make sure you personalize your landing page, too.
Achieving Success With Video Email Marketing
As you can see, it’s easy to use video in email marketing campaigns. The challenge lies in making that video a truly valuable piece of content for each individual email recipient.
We’ve found the secret to making videos relevant is personalization. You can drive ROI and retention by wowing your customers with videos that are 100% unique. And you can do it at scale, even if you have millions of customers around the world, as Ubisoft and many of our clients do.
If you’re ready to send video emails that get results, we should talk. Click below to schedule a call with one of our Personalized Video pros.
