Adding video to your email marketing strategy is one of the most effective ways to increase brand awareness, engagement, and click-through rates.
The number of email users is on pace to grow to 4.3 billion by the end of 2023. It’s a big number and a big reason email marketing remains an important – and extremely effective – way to increase engagement and drive traffic to your website.
Email marketing can take a variety of forms, including a simple business update, the promotion of a product or service, an invitation to a special event or any other newsletter idea designed to keep your brand top of mind. If you’re looking for people to open and click through, then incorporating video content can supercharge email marketing campaigns, improving click-through rates (CTRs) by up to 300 per cent.
Incorporating video in emails to customers and potential customers
- increases conversion and CTRs
- boosts email open rates
- builds trust and credibility
People love consuming video content. A survey by Wyzowl shows people watched online video content for an average of more 2.5 hours per day in 2022, that’s up from 1.5 hours on average in 2018.
How to use video in email marketing strategy
Adding creative video content in your email marketing campaign will help you stand out among increasingly bloated inboxes. Video emails can build excitement for what you’re offering. They encourage subscribers to open rather than discard your email and they entice them to visit your website.
Here are seven best practices to make the most impact of your email marketing:
1. Target the right audience
Use the data you’ve collected about your customers to segment your email audiences into common groups identified by their purchase history, interests, demographics, buyer journey progress – whatever you think is relevant to your business and types of promotions. Having one long list of email addresses will not help you drive sales. Once you’ve segmented your audience, you can create and share the video content that will help build engagement and trust.
Remember to include the word “video” in your subject line to increase open rates even further.
2. Establish goals and objectives
Knowing what you want to achieve will help you determine the types of videos that drive results. For example, video emails can help brands:
- Raise awareness and build interest
- Enhance the customer experience by providing value-added content
- Educate your audience about a product or your brand
- Promote products and events
- Announce a product launch
- Showcase your brand culture
With a tangible goal in mind, you’ll want to have a strong call to action for both the email and the video. This will help ensure the overall message of the campaign is consistent and that your target audience takes the desired action.
3. Strategically embed video in your email marketing
Here are two ways to incorporate video into an email:
- Add a play button to a still image of your video. If your email subscribers are interested in the content of the video, they will likely click on it and be redirected to the actual video on your website or another hosting platform, such as YouTube. Make sure the backend functionality is in place to support seamless navigation.
- Create a clickable GIF of the video and embed it as an image in the email. Unlike the play button, a GIF moves, which will help it stand out more. Once subscribers click on it, they will be redirected to the actual video.
4. Create short, compelling videos
A growing body of research shows attention spans are getting shorter. This understanding is especially important when crafting videos for email. The first 15 seconds are critical and the entire video should be kept to less than two minutes to keep your target audience watching to the end.
Add relevant captions to your video. A large share, 64 per cent, of marketers say videos with captions perform better than those without.
5. Track performance
There are specific metrics for both video and email. For video, these include watch time and completion rate. Measuring these metrics will help you determine if the topic resonated with your audience and where engagement dropped off. For email, track open rates, CTRs, and time spent reviewing the email. Together, these metrics will help you gauge whether the video led to better performance, and you’ll find out how to improve.
6. Experiment
Test a range of email-video combinations. For example, try including a how-to product video in a promotional email. Experimenting in this way will allow you to enhance your campaign and improve performance.
Use A/B testing to test different versions (A and B) of content to see how many people clicked on it, watched the complete video, and went on to visit your site. This information will help you see what’s working and for which audience segment.
7. Make it personal
Create custom video experiences for your target audience. This can be as simple as starting the video by addressing a specific type of individual and highlighting what that person is looking for in a product. You can also repurpose video content you’ve already created to make it more relevant for individual subscribers. Personalizing video helps build a connection and trust and makes the interaction more memorable.
There’s no question email marketing has grown to be a major component of any strategy, and video content can clearly inject new life into any campaign. The latest research shows 85 per cent of businesses already use video as an advertising tool, and 92 per cent of marketers have made it an important part of their marketing strategy. Even more, 88 per cent of marketers report video provides a positive return on investment.
If you are not incorporating video into your email marketing campaigns, you’re missing an opportunity to build excitement about your brand and increase CTRs and conversions. There’s no better time to get started than right now.
