Is email marketing dead? It is one of the primary debates in the digital marketing landscape today. For most marketers, email belongs to traditional marketing techniques. However, a closer look at the numbers paints a different picture. In come email videos.
While email remains a powerful marketing and communication tool, its application has changed rapidly over the years. Therefore, achieving key email marketing metrics such as open rate, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, bounce rate, and list growth rate is now more laborious due to the proliferation of other digital marketing tools.
Did you know email videos can have a revolutionizing impact on your marketing strategy? It’s true. If you are a digital marketer, you can tweak your email marketing strategy to fit this rapidly evolving consumer market. Fortunately, one way to do this is by embedding video in your email campaigns.
This post will explore the benefits of adding video content in your emails, how to do this, and tips to boost the effectiveness of your video email campaigns.
Let’s begin.
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The Immense Potential of Email Marketing
A recent survey shows 3.9 billion email users today, and the number will grow to over 4.3 billion by 2023. The same report shows users send over 293.6 billion emails daily. Not only that, another email marketing survey says 81% of Small and Medium Businesses use email as the primary customer acquisition tool.
Nevertheless, these are just a few of the numbers that highlight the potential of email in today’s digital marketing landscape. So, if you have ignored email as a strategic marketing tool, it’s time to reassess your campaigns.
Here are some of the reasons to revive your email marketing campaigns:
Reasons Why Email is Still Relevant
- An email is a versatile tool: You can use your emails to launch new products, send updates, boost engagement levels, create brand awareness, customer acquisition, lead generation and much more.
- Cost-effectiveness: Email is one of the cheapest marketing tools compared to print and other electronic marketing techniques. If you are a startup or SME, you can use this tool to build brand visibility. Furthermore, the low overheads for sending thousands of emails at a time makes this the perfect tool for businesses.
- Targeted marketing: Email campaigns use contact lists generated from already engaged customers. Hence, it’s easy to segment your emails and send them to subscribers who meet specific criteria. It also increases the effectiveness and ROI of your campaigns.
- Ease of personalization: Personalization has a massive impact on the open rate for your emails. Fortunately, it’s easy to personalize emails using already collected data from your customers.
- Easy set up: It’s easy to start an email campaign without significant planning or financial injection. Some brands even send simple emails, yet compelling messaging will boost their effectiveness.
- Performance measuring: One of the significant advantages of email is the ease of tracking and measuring key metrics. You can use free analytics tools to measure open rates, CTR, conversion rates, and others.
- Sharable content: Email is easy to share with the click of a button. If you have suitable email formats and offers, you can boost your brand, conversion rates, and improve lead generation.
- Highest ROI: Compared to outbound marketing techniques, email is unrivaled when it comes to ROI. Email marketing can give an ROI as high as 4400%.
- Customers love emails: research shows customers like promotional email content and also love hearing from their favorite brands.
Email Video: Unlocking the Potential of Your Email Campaigns
If your email campaigns are sluggish and you are not reaching the key metrics, it’s time to harness the power of video. Video is now one of the most powerful marketing tools. Its versatility makes it ideal for a diverse range of applications.
Today, 81% of businesses leverage video as a marketing tool. Moreover, online video content is growing at an incredible rate. By 2022, it will constitute 82% of all consumer internet traffic. Similarly, YouTube, which is the largest video sharing platform, boasts over 2 billion logged-in monthly users.
Thus, as a digital marketer, these numbers statistics are hard to ignore. Video content is popular with internet users, and the role of a marketer is to leverage this to reach a wider audience.
Other benefits of deploying video in your marketing strategy include:
Benefits of Video in the Advertising Campaign
- It’s easily sharable: This promotes your brand’s visibility
- Multiple applications: You can use video to educate, inform, promote your brand/products/services, and create user-generated content (UGC), in email marketing, among other ways.
- It’s fun and effective: Users find video content more entertaining than text, and this contributes to its higher effectiveness and ROI.
- Leverage mobile: More internet users are now on mobile. Moreover, video is one of the most popular forms of content on these devices.
- SEO boost: Search engines love video. A quick glance at the first page of search engine result pages (SERPs) gives a hint of how effective video can be for your SEO campaigns.
Adding a video in your marketing email has a significant impact on marketing metrics. This content increases open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and revenues.
Videos in emails also build trust and authenticity. Now that most customers love video content, you can enjoy more site traffic, which boosts your SEO efforts.
Most mobile users love sharing entertaining content, and if you learn how to send a video through email, this will have a massive boost in brand visibility and brand awareness. Furthermore, social media shares can rejuvenate your struggling campaign and give your campaign a considerable marketing help. So, send a video through email and enjoy its benefits.
Can you Send a Video through Email?
Of course you can. It is easy as uploading a file to the email by the click of a button.
How to Email Videos
Here are some ways to send video by email:
1. Embedding
One solution for email video marketing is to embed your video into emails. While this is a go-to option, you should understand that not all subscribers might see or open your video. Moreover, the opening might depend on whether their email clients can support a new video format, like HTML5 video.
There might also be problems opening embedded emails for subscribers using emails on mobile. What’s more, tracking the views might be a problem because viewers don’t click through to a new page.
Luckily, there’s a variety of video tools to help you embed a video into an email. Some offer hosting solutions while others send and manage the campaigns for you.
2. Animated GIFs and Animations
This is a popular alternative to traditional videos. It allows you to send videos by email. Moreover, it is a creative way to showcase your products or services in both a fun and entertaining manner.
3. Video Caption Image/Thumbnails
Another option is to use an image that looks like a video. This can be a screenshot of your video with a play button icon. Before sending your emails, make sure you share the actual video on platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, social media, or a landing page on your website.
Nevertheless, for this type of video to work in your emails, you’ll need an engaging visual preview to attract clicks.
Kindly note that on your video image, you should include the link to your video, allowing your email contacts to click and watch the video. The good news is, it’s easy to track views now when subscribers move to the clicked page.
4. Attachment Files
While some marketers opt for using an attachment, it’s an option that might not work seamlessly. Moreover, if you have a large file, it will take time and bandwidth to attach to all contacts.
Subscribers also shun email attachments due to fear of malware. When assessing options on how to email videos, consider that tan attachment doesn’t have that appeal to readers to click.
Boosting the Effectiveness Of Video Emails
While using video in email campaigns is a highly effective tactic, many digital marketers use this method without achieving desired results. Thus, if your email video marketing metrics are mediocre, here are some tweaks to consider:
Sending Video through Email Effectively & Efficiently
- Add the term “video” in the subject line: Hinting there’s a video on your email through the subject line increases the click-through rate.
- Avoid appearing spammy: Create a personalized, concise subject line for your emails and deliver on any promise you make.
- Use the best video format: You should rely on analytics to understand your target audience and create the right video format for them. Furthermore, the video you choose should aid in achieving your marketing goals. For instance, you should select a different video for increasing brand awareness, SEO campaigns, product launch, boosting site traffic etc.
- Short and simple: keep your videos short, direct, and concise.
- Narrow down your focus: Don’t target too many objectives for a single campaign. Focus on a single point and tackle it comprehensively.
- Create a Series of Videos: This allows you to tackle a broad range of topics, plus keeping your audience engaged while they anticipate your next email.
- Use interviews and customer testimonials: User-generated content (UGC) gives authenticity to your marketing emails. For instance, you can use employees or customers as voice overs in your videos. Moreover, It builds trust and loyalty among the readers/viewers.
- Call to action (CTA): Make sure you have a clear CTA to boost the effectiveness of your emails.
- Avoid autoplay: Autoplay might look like a great idea. However, many viewers want the freedom to click on the play icon when they need to.
- Personalize the content: Once you identify your target audience through analytics, create tailored content as this will have a more significant impact.
- Add excellent email copy: You need a compelling copy to accompany your video in your email. Write a concise and straightforward email copy, also focusing on clarity and communicating.
- Leverage the best tools to send your videos on email: Can you send a video through email? It is the question most marketers ask. Fortunately, with the right tools, the answer is yes. There’s software that allows you to easily send your videos (embedded to thumbnail images) to your email contact list.
Wrapping Up
Email marketing is not dead, and the fact that users send billions of emails daily is proof enough of this. However, you have to up your email marketing approach to keep up with other digital marketing techniques.
Using videos in your emails is a great strategy. Furthermore, video is a powerful marketing tool. Thus, when you add it to your emails, it tends to boosts key metrics; including click-through rates, open rates, conversion, among others. This guide will get you started to send a video through email marketing campaign.