Koushik Marka / 5 Mins Read
Updated: April 6, 2024
These bunch of reasons marketers must know why you must try experimenting with videos in an email marketing campaign.
When it comes to digital marketing, email marketing is an evergreen and one of the most used methods to promote something. With new developments in web technologies, these email-based marketing newsletters have become much more interactive and informative.
Did you know that videos have become a major source of how we consume information online? A lot of companies find success on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo.
Today's the best thing about email marketing campaigns is that you can customize your campaign newsletters to the last strain and add elements such as GIFs, shoppable videos and more.
A report from back in 2016 reveals that adding a video to a newsletter can boost your open rate by 19% and your click-through rate by 200 to 300%. Such a boost in numbers can bring significant improvements to your campaigns, and you will be able to interact with your mailing list better.
In this article, we will examine the prospects of videos in email marketing and how you can easily set up a campaign with a video to increase conversions or open rates.
Email Marketing with Videos - Why?
We mentioned many reasons in the introduction as to why one can try experimenting with videos in an email marketing campaign. However, to understand why videos have become a powerful tool in this sector, we need to look at some major reasons in detail.
When it comes to writing impressive newsletter copy that attracts the receiver’s attention, one must spend a lot of time optimizing and trimming down the text content to as little as possible.
But by adding a video to your campaign newsletters, you will not only be able to interact with the receivers better but also provide more information in a creative manner. Many companies use explainer videos to introduce a new product or to upsell something.
These explainer videos can also be used to introduce a new procedure or in a newsletter series where you have to inform the receivers about something one by one. The possibilities of using videos in an email marketing campaign are endless.
One can definitely save a lot of time with a video where they can use videos instead of a written copy to explain more things.
Adding a video to an email marketing campaign can significantly boost the CTR. We discussed this in the introduction, but to discuss further on this topic, more CTR means a better chance of converting to a successful lead/sale.
Recommended: 6 Tips to Boost Conversion Rates
Per some statistics shared by HubSpot, campaigns with videos in their email marketing campaigns saw a significant spike in conversion. Campaigns that used videos in their newsletters had a conversion rate of 4.8% as compared to the 2.9% that the campaigns without videos.
It has been noticed that consumers respond well to companies with a human element. Taking an example out of context, Wendy’s Twitter account can be seen tweeting and replying to people with human humor, making the brand more friendly and leaving a very nice impression on potential customers.
Imagine doing the same with a series of videos planned on a topic. Such email marketing campaigns can achieve great results.
One example is Marie Forleo, who uses email marketing campaigns to drive traffic to videos like the one below.
Just head to YouTube and check how people have responded to her video in the comments. Such videos create a human connection between you and your audience, making your company stand out from the rest.
A report by Business 2 Community revealed that pages with videos get about 94% more views compared to pages with text-only content. Of course, this is an obvious fact since videos have become a huge part of our online activities.
A large chunk of our online clock time is spent on websites such as YouTube & Vimeo. Watching a YouTube or a Vimeo video in an email marketing newsletter is bound to drive curious audience members to your pages on YouTube and Vimeo.
This is a huge benefit as you’re driving traffic directly to your pages, where you can gather the attention that people have to offer and promote your brand.
Videos also provide a huge gateway to a better call to action, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time playing scrabble to find better words for these CTAs.
Almost every email marketing service, such as MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact etc., allows adding videos to your newsletters. This post section will show how one can easily set up video campaigns.
The first thing that you need to do while adding a video to your campaign is research and plan. This is the step that is going to define the end goal of using videos in your newsletters.
You can set your own targets but keep in mind that the videos that work best with your campaign will be the ones you produce specifically for the purpose.
This means preparing the video(s) according to your plan and creating a newsletter around that. In the next section, we will discuss some of the best practices for this.
Any step you take towards marketing something online requires proper research and using proven things that work best. This is exactly the reason why people follow a certain set of guidelines while performing SEO.
This also applies to video-based email marketing. Just adding a video to a newsletter will barely get any results until you do it correctly. Let's look at how you can properly add videos to your newsletters.
With modern web technologies available today, adding videos to a newsletter has never been easier. But remember that this has a few quirks in today’s mobile-first world. While adding videos to the newsletter works fine for Gmail users, it might not be true for users on platforms like Outlook.
The reason for this is the fact that apps for these services aren’t really capable of showing videos inside an email. But to fix that, you can use services such as Viwomail. Services like these use HTML5 to embed and autoplay (you can turn it off) videos in your email.
Services like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor have added native support for videos through third-party websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and more but embedding videos through HTML5 makes more sense. Alternatively, instead of adding a video directly to the email, you can add an animated GIF to drive traffic to another page that hosts the video.
ii. Using GIFs to Drive Traffic to Video Page
If your main target is to drive traffic to a page hosting your video, adding a GIF instead of a video might be more effective.
You can drive traffic to your YouTube page (or any other brand page, for that matter) and to a landing page where you can engage a user and convert them into a lead/sale.
This can be achieved by using a static image with a simple play button, but we all know how dynamic creatives can gather more attention, and this is precisely why GIFs come very close to adding a video to an email.
iii. To Autoplay or Not - That is the question!
While adding a video that auto-plays as soon as the page loads are very annoying and it is also frowned upon by audiences, auto-playing a video in a newsletter is perfectly fine as gathering a user’s attention as soon as they open the email is of utmost importance.
To summarize what we discussed here, let us look at the points mentioned in the article one by one.
Finally, with so many positive reasons to start a video-based email marketing campaign, you should definitely plan one as soon as possible. Always remember that you can be creative and use videos, such as interactive explainer videos or normal point-and-shoot videos, to promote something in an email newsletter.
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Koushik Marka is the founder and CEO of an explainer video production company titled Studiotale. With strong entrepreneurship and professional skills, his qualities do not end there. With expertise in Vector Illustration, 2D Animation, Motion Graphics, and Digital Marketing, he loves what he does. Apart from being a work enthusiast, his off-work preferences are playing video games and traveling.,
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