Are you looking for the best way to make your emails stand out in your customers’ inboxes?
If yes, then combining your email campaigns with videos can work wonders. It’ll boost your open and engagement rates and increase your ROI and sales. That’s why 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
When used correctly, video marketing educates your customers, promotes your services and products, and boosts brand loyalty and credibility.
We’ll dive into what video email marketing is, its benefits, and how to do it right. So, whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a new business owner, we’ve got you covered.
What Is Video Email Marketing?
Video email marketing is a strategy to include videos in your email marketing campaigns to help your emails stand out in customers’ inboxes. The marketing strategy uses static images with a play button as a link to a video, GIFs, and embedded HTML5 videos to increase subscriber engagement.
Video email marketing is so effective that 92% of marketers value video as a crucial part of their marketing strategies.
With that in mind, let’s look at some benefits of adding videos to your email marketing campaigns.
Benefits of Video Email Marketing
Video email marketing is one of the best strategies you can implement in your campaigns. That’s why most marketers (92%) have jumped on the proverbial bandwagon. Video emails hook the viewers and increase engagement.
Here are four more benefits of video email marketing:
1. It Creates Customer Trust and Builds Credibility
Trust is a scarce commodity in business, and if you want to build a loyal following, you need people to trust your brand.
Branded video content is one of the best ways to gain credibility and customer trust. An Animoto survey shares that 93% of marketers say they’ve gained a new customer because of a video they posted on social media.
Branded video content lets you show your audience what your brand is about instead of just telling them. For example, customer testimonials and explainer videos can shape consumers’ perceptions of your business and products.
2. It Increases Your Email Open Rates
According to research, videos can increase your email open rates by 19% and click-through rates by 65%. On top of that, mentioning the word “video” in your subject line can boost the open rates by 7% to 13%.
The good thing about video email marketing is that it can also increase the response rate of any email type, like the following:
- Welcome emails to new customers
- Specific sales emails that require a call to action (CTA)
- Engagement emails that serve content
3. It Boosts Your Conversion Rates
On top of increased open rates and engagement, video can boost your conversion rates by helping consumers better understand your services and products. In fact, 94% of brands say that videos have helped them increase user understanding of their services or products.
Based on such stats, it’s clear that videos should play a massive role in your email marketing campaigns.
To develop an effective video email strategy, you’ll need powerful email marketing software to help you build trust at critical stages throughout the sales funnel.
4. It Increases Customer Retention and Loyalty
Customer retention is one of the most effective ways to increase the profitability of your business. In fact, by increasing customer retention by 5%, you can expect a 25–95% boost in profits.
An excellent way to increase customer retention is through videos since you can use them to explain complex topics to customers in a simple and more engaging way.
For instance, no one wants to read hundreds of pages to understand a product demo. But breaking down the demo into bite-sized video chunks helps customers understand it faster and remember it for longer. As a result, the customers are more likely to stick with your business.
How to Use Video in Email Marketing
Now that we’ve looked at the benefits of videos in email marketing, here are some effective ways to incorporate video content into your email marketing campaigns today.
Market Company Events Using Video
Using video emails to promote your company events is effective since it’s like sending an invitation directly to someone’s inbox.
For example, does your brand host monthly happy hours for its local clients? Add a video in your email about the most recent event with a call to action (CTA) for recipients to learn more about the next one.
That way, you can give them a taste of how your business works and increase awareness of your company’s events.
Here are some tips to help you create engaging videos showcasing your company events:
- Be authentic when communicating through video
- Interview attendees by engaging them during and after the event to get their reactions
- Create post-event recaps and use personal videos to follow up with hot leads
- Capture event highlights in one digestible package to get people excited for your next event
Send a Personalized Holiday Greeting
You can let your subscribers know you appreciate them by using videos in your emails to send holiday greetings.
Here’s an example from Rentalcars.com that uses a video email to send a holiday greeting to their subscribers:
Some ways you can use videos to make your holiday greetings more exciting include the following:
- Preparing the video script in advance and keeping it short and straightforward
- Making sure your video clips have a specific holiday theme. Add holiday items, seasonal decorations, and holiday music to the video
- Creating a more personal feel by inviting your customer care and sales teams to join you in wishing your customers a happy holiday season
Announce a Product Launch with Video Emails
When launching a new product line, including a video in your email can take the product launch from good to great. That’s because 54% of customers want to see more video content from a business they support.
With that in mind, here’s how you can use videos to make your product launch more effective:
- Leverage storytelling to engage viewers
- Show parts of your product to tease your customers’ curiosity and build excitement
- Use good music to emotionally engage people and make your product launch video memorable
- Add a clear call to action (CTA) at the end of the video
Send Customer Testimonial Videos to Leads
Customer testimonial videos can increase conversion and persuade potential customers to take action. That’s because it’s a recommendation from a current customer who’s used your product. Plus, a video makes customer testimonials more credible.
Here are some best practices to follow when sending customer testimonial videos to your subscribers:
- Make sure the video testimonial is relevant to the email content. For example, don’t send a testimonial video of women’s shoes to an audience of men
- Don’t send too many testimonial videos
- Make sure the email subject line is catchy
How to Add Videos to Your Emails
Adding videos to your emails can be challenging since major email clients such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo don’t support embedded videos. As a result, your subscribers may be unable to watch your videos within the email, or they won’t see your email since it’ll be sent to their spam folders.
But here’s the good news: You can use an email marketing tool to add videos and send them to your subscribers without a hustle. Just sign in to your account and create an email, then add a video block and click on Save & Continue once you’re done.
Alternatively, if you’re using a Gmail account, you can embed a portion of your video within the email and persuade customers to click through and watch the rest.
Here’s how you can do that:
1. Find the URL of the video you want to include to create a GIF of the video. In this example, we’ll use a YouTube video by Neil Patel: 7 eCommerce Email Marketing Tactics That Work Like a Charm.
2. Go to Imgflip.com, a website that allows you to create animated GIFs from videos. Then, copy/paste the URL directly to Imgflip. You can also download the video to your computer and upload it. For this walk-through, we’ve copied and pasted the URL from YouTube.
3. Once you’ve uploaded the video, you’ll see the pop-up below. The green and red triangles will help you choose where to start and stop your GIF. After you’ve selected a clip for your GIF, click “Generate GIF.”
4. Click “Download .gif” after your GIF has been generated.
5. After downloading the GIF, create an email and drag and drop your GIF from your computer into the email. Below the GIF, add a call to action (CTA), such as “Click here to view full video” with a link to the video.
You can add an email subject line with “Video included” to further increase click-through rates. Also, ensure the video you’re adding is exciting and compelling for your email subscribers to increase the open and engagement rates.
Start Video Email Marketing Today
Using videos in your email marketing campaigns can be a fun and engaging way to connect with your audience, elevate your brand, and increase your sales.
Hopefully, this guide has persuaded you to implement videos into your marketing strategies for a better ROI and increased revenue.
Do you have other video email marketing tips we haven’t mentioned? Share the post with your answers.
Cover image via Freepik.
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