By Owen Fay . Posted on February 8, 2023Video content has become an important part of any successful email marketing campaign. Studies show that video content emails show higher click-through, open, and conversion rates. With the right video content, you can engage your subscribers and encourage them to take action. According to a study by Forrester, adding videos in an email marketing campaign boosts your click-through rate by 200-300%. This just goes to show the impact of a great video on your email marketing.
This article will cover the top 10 best practices for using video in your email marketing campaigns. Learn how to make the most of your video content and increase the success of your campaigns.
Incorporating Email With Video Marketing
The inclusion of videos in email marketing is a highly effective tool for different marketing goals, including your brand awareness, conversions, and driving engagement. Video email marketing is exactly what it sounds like – adding videos to your email so they’ll stand out in inboxes. Although the term may sound entirely separate from email marketing, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Videos complement the email, adding value to what users love and engaging them in your content, making it more likely that they will click through.
Videos also tend to catch a person’s attention more than any other online medium. Video marketing allows brands to tell a story emotionally and visually, which drives a positive perception of your brand. It can also help drive demand and generate leads.
Best Practices for Including Video in Your Email Marketing Campaigns
1. Define Your Objective
Do you want to create leads, announce upcoming events, or share news about your business? Defining your objective up front gives your email marketing campaign focus.
By defining your video email marketing campaign, it’s easier to measure the success of your efforts. It also guides the direction of your campaign.
2. Be Upfront With Your Subscribers
You can be more upfront by discussing the benefits instead of the features. You can tell your subscribers “what’s in it for them” by talking about the possible benefits of your products and services rather than listing the features.
One industry-wide best practice is using ‘video’ or ‘demo’ in your email subject line, so subscribers know that they’re not dealing with text alone.
In fact, including the word ‘video’ in your subject lines boosts your email open rates to up to 19% and a click-through rate of 65%, according to a study by Syndacast. You can also boost your engagement further by giving your readers what they expect through your video content. Showing them exactly how your product works, explaining a new feature, or even just talking about your business will help build a trustworthy and lasting relationship with users.
3. Personalize Your Videos
Videos are an effective way to improve the lifecycle of your products and services. It’s also a highly visual, informative, and entertaining way to connect with your audience directly.
A personalized video is a type of video that’s customized and relevant to a particular target audience. Here’s how you can incorporate video personalization during certain life cycles stages:
- Introduction Stage: At this point, users have little or no awareness of your product. So, we recommend integrating promo videos, explainers, and corporate videos into your email marketing campaign. Using this helps build awareness and can be easily viewed as a source of entertainment and information.
- Growth Stage: During this stage, your target demographic is aware of your product, but competition is also emerging. So, you need to stand out from the rest of the pack. Using product videos, promo videos, and corporate videos is recommended. They’re cost-effective in reducing your marketing spending and helping raise awareness, boost sales, and develop brand loyalty.
- Maturity Stage: At this stage, your sales have peaked, and growth is slowing down. That’s why you need to create an impact to reignite your target market’s interest. Testimonials, case studies, and animated advertising videos help you boost conversions and make you trustworthy in other people’s eyes, setting your brand apart.
- Decline Stage: When the demand for your product falls, training videos, promo, or sales videos are excellent to reignite buyers’ interest. Aside from re-engaging your target audience, it also helps build brand loyalty in the long run.
4. Place Your Video Below the Email Copy
You can also write a few words introducing your video because sending emails without texts looks like spam. Your copy should convey a message on its own in case the video doesn’t show up on their device.
Your email needs both a copy and a video to be compelling. When you create a combination of effective copy and video content, you give users multiple ways to engage with the business. This provides more conversion opportunities and can help with sales, growth, and brand reputation.
It’s worth noting that once subscribers open your email, you only have a few seconds to capture their attention. So, avoid using technical jargon and keep it simple, as if you’re talking to a friend. Create a balance between engaging subject lines, powerful copy, and meaningful video content to create the best user experience.
5. Keep it Short
Unless you have a really good reason to include longer videos in your email, you have to keep email videos short. Expect your target audience to watch your video while they work or complete other tasks. They most likely don’t have the time to watch a lengthy video, make sure to convey your message in under a minute. Then encourage the user to learn more by clicking a link or going to your site.
If you’re still in doubt, think about being on the receiving end of the email during the busiest part of your typical workday. If you opt to skip or wouldn’t watch the entire video, don’t expect other people to watch it.
6. Enable Autoplay, But Turn the Sound Off
Although generally, autoplay bothers users who don’t know what’s coming. Email marketing is the exception. Users expect it to play instantly when they click the email or see that you’ve included a video. They’ll end up frustrated if they have to click again to load the video or can’t properly view the content, leading to unsubscribed users, less conversion opportunities, and fewer sales. A best practice in video email marketing is to enable autoplay but turn the sound off on your videos, this allows users to see the content but won’t annoy them with sound.
That’s because if your video auto plays in your subscribers’ inbox, you can reach a view rate of up to 90% as opposed to 16% in general image links in traditional email marketing campaigns.
7. Produce Quality Content
You must ensure that the video content you’re emailing customers is unique, visually appealing, and aligns with your brand’s identity. While creating quality content might seem hard, with a number of great tools, you don’t need a massive budget or experience. With video email marketing, your content should be about relevance and value.
The content that you should ask your customers to watch should be content that will help them. Something that will allow them to know more about the product, get a benefit they could miss out on, or understand the complex processes behind your business. Unleashing video content in your email marketing helps accomplish all of your growth objectives.
8. Add a Clear CTA
Your call to action is one of the most important parts of your video in email marketing. It should be actionable, clear, and concise. At the end of your video, make sure to add a clear call-to-action to tell users what steps to take to benefit from your product or service. Place it underneath your video or at the bottom of your email.
Think about what your viewers want after watching your video. Do you want them to sign up for an event or share your content online? No matter what the action is, make sure to tell the viewer, you ultimately want them to click through your email, so you need to tell them where to do it. To get the best results, make your CTA simple and prominent.
Your videos and email must have a clear CTA that guides users to take action. When you include CTAs in your videos, viewers know what to do next, even if they don’t go back to the email after watching it. It’s an excellent way to check whether it’s the right video for your email’s overall messaging.
9. Consider Copy and Subject Lines
To watch your video, users need to open your email first. That’s why a compelling subject line is vital. Moreover, one of the easiest ways for your emails to be opened is by telling your viewers what’s waiting for them inside. It’s worth noting that one of the most critical aspects of your email campaign is your subject line.
A compelling subject line will boost the number of open rates you’re getting and, in turn, lead to more conversions. Excellent subject lines are often ones that are descriptive or personal. It gives people a reason to view your content. It’s best to consider your target audience, what they care about, and what benefit they get from interacting with your email.
In the same way, your email body text should also be on point. You need to provide enough information to catch the reader’s attention. Ensure that your body copy conveys what you’re offering and why it’s crucial, and tie it up with your value proposition. When writing a good copy, make it brief, compelling, and enjoyable to readers. Tell a story when emphasizing a point, use statistics, and use strong language as much as possible.
10. Always Test Your Content
Nothing will turn people off more than broken links, images that don’t load properly in an email, copy that isn’t engaging, or overall poor design. The best way to ensure your emails are effective and working before sending them out is to test them with your target audience.
While you could have someone else look over the email, they don’t know what your users want quite like your users. Testing with your target audience gives you the feedback of the people you are trying to reach. Poll the People allows you to get great feedback on your copy, videos, design, and more, fast and cost-effectively.
Poll the People is an easy-to-use market research platform to test assets like emails, videos, ads, logos, branding, and more using our dedicated user panel. We help marketers become superheroes by reducing risk, driving conversions, and improving overall marketing effectiveness. By unleashing the combined power of AI and human intelligence, we help you create optimized, validated digital assets.
With the feedback you gather from your users, you can find issues, understand what they like, and make changes to convert and engage all of your email recipients with your video content.
Conclusion
It’s easy to use video in your email marketing campaigns. However, making it valuable content for every email recipient is the real challenge. You must create a consistent brand identity in your campaigns and boost your conversion rates with compelling video content.
These tips allow you to use videos in your email campaigns. Now, you can complement the early morning caffeine buzz of your subscribers while optimizing your marketing efforts at the same time. When you create your video marketing campaign, follow our tips, and don’t forget the best way to optimize your content is with Poll the People.
With expert-built templates, a dedicated user panel, and AI-backed analysis tools getting feedback from your audience has never been easier. Sign up for Poll the People and create better email campaigns in minutes.
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Monika Grover
Thanks for sharing these great tips for using video in email marketing campaigns! I especially appreciated the advice about keeping the video short and sweet and including a clear call to action. I’ve seen too many emails with long, rambling videos that don’t really get to the point, so it’s great to have some guidance on how to do it right. I’ll definitely be putting these best practices to use in my next email campaign!