Video in email marketing: How to make your emails +300% more efficient?

Letters have always had a bit of coziness in it. Despite the content, it is something that addressed only to the person that opens it. The nature of it has been preserved in the feeling we get when we open our online letters. People quite often start their days by opening emails to look for something new.

Imagine how good it is to receive something worthy of watching with the morning coffee! This is how brands can treat and care about their followers. To send something interesting, engaging, or nice will be pleasant for anyone who is looking for a stronger relationship with the audience.

Marketing nowadays has many faces. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not only about selling things. In many respects, what brands crave is a trustful relationship with the audience. Marketing in its various forms is a way to achieve that. The definition of video marketing is very simple – it’s email marketing with video materials embed in a letter. It’s understandable why the marketers and brands implement video in an email since the video is the most popular form of content today.

Video is an engaging medium to consume new information. To get what the thing is about is easier visually than verbally. No wonder video is the key to the modern marketing world.

What types of email marketing can you apply to make better relationships with subscribers? Personalized emails. Personalized emails are a way to care about your viewer, as well as a way to gently turn this person to something he/she has missed from your content.

How does it work?

A prevalent behavior around the internet is to start some video and not finish it. No matter what are the reasons for that – to remind people about the video they didn’t finish last time and encourage them to give it another try. It is easy for you to notice this when you analyze how the viewers behave on your brand pages.

Newsletters

One of the best features of email is newsletters. Scheduled newsletters are this cozy thing that does not have any hurry in it, so the viewer can open it whenever it’s really good for him. If you include video to newsletters, you’re making a viewer twice interested in the subject. In given circumstances – when there is more trust to video as a medium than to texts – video is the right tone for newsletters.

Texts do not produce on the audience the emotional waves they feel after watching a video. Some companies do weekly reviews in the form of video. It not supposed to be videos from your company. A newsletter could include something new that happened in your industry during the given time (a week or a month – depending on how often you have scheduled them), or it is various topics that are interesting to know about.

Good marketing video necessarily has an emotional component. Because emotion consolidates how a customer would treat you in the future, it also helps to build a better relationship with the audience you have. According to the numbers, only including the word “video” into your email could increase how often people would open it or click on it.

Triggered emails

A trigger email is an automated email letters brand send to ensure customers that the company is trustworthy. It works automatically – once a subscriber acted, triggered email appears in the mailbox. Triggered emails in its very core is an attempt to build a conversation with a subscriber.

Unlike promotional emails, trigger emails, according to numbers, show higher conversion rates. Birthday emails are one of the most popular and common forms of triggered emails. Reactivation letters and welcome emails also used by all companies as standard practice.

Email blasts

It’s a single email message that is sent to many email lists. Obviously, the reason for using it is wide subscribers’ reach that is possible with such an action. Email blasts are a bit more aggressive than other forms of email marketing.

The only goal is to send promotional content. It’s worthy of mentioning it, even though email blasts, not the best way to communicate with the audience. Just another form to be aware of. Some companies, however, don’t neglect it.

Targeted emails

Targeted email marketing, as it goes from the name of this marketing approach, is sending targeted email campaigns to subscribers that can be unified by some shared characteristic – age or online preferences. It is a way to send a personalized message to a group of people.

If you know your audience, you can distinguish what people are following you. Therefore, you can send a personalized message that will speak directly to them. Why would you want to send targeted emails? First of all, if your message is not fit the needs or interests of your audience, it will be irrelevant to them. Your brand may lose customers, subscribers, and communication won’t as good as possible.

If your message is relevant to your audience, they will be more active and engage with content. Targeted emails usually based on subscribers’ profile information, which includes location, age, etc.; online behavior and how these people act on emails – open them or not, tend to ignore, etc. The best way to segment your audience is to base it on preferences in products.

Event follow-ups

Event emails are very simple in its core – it is an invitation to attend some events that will take place shortly. If your event email is not just informative but also engaging, it will make a subscriber at least curious about it. Such a thing is a way to promote both your company and the event.

Invite your subscribers to attend essential events your company is about to make. A personalized invitation is an excellent way to show that your subscriber is an important member of the community – no matter how big or small it is – that built around your brand.

Customer communications

We have already mentioned email newsletters. This is what most of the companies consider their convenient way to create communication with subscribers and customers.

Besides, we recommend making every type of customer communication email more personalized. Welcome emails, invitation to attend an event, survey emails are critical in the form, as well as delivery.

Nurture emails

Nurture emails are commonly used for marketing tools. Brands use it in order to push a customer to make a sale. Nurture emails, in some way, are very alike to welcome emails. Its main goal is to educate customers about the product or the area the company is presenting. Some companies use talking heads, 2d animation, or video with infographics. If you want to convey the importance and value of your company and products, nurture emails could be helpful.

Try to be brief and precise

Email marketing is best to consume when it’s not over-detailed. Short and precise videos are suitable for many forms of online marketing. Email marketing is not an exception. People tend to skip big blocks of texts from brands, and the same goes for videos. If the video to long or so, a few would watch it. It’s common for many viewers not even to start watching videos that promise to be too long. The length is of colossal importance.

Always measure performance

Interactions with the audience always can be improved. You can be more interested in generating content or at least more creative in the ways you offer it for the audience. Keep track of how people react to your email marketing performance. If you see that something is working for your audience and they find it engaging, continue improving that line.

If something didn’t work and the results on it are poor, it is a sign that you should stop using that strategy. It’s especially important to test how did it work when you are only trying email marketing out. Reflecting on your performance is an essential practice. Without it, you will be a bit blind about what really works for your viewers and what was a fail from the very beginning.

What exactly you should reflect on?

The conversation rate is significant for any brand on any platform or within a marketing strategy. In order to understand who is your audience and how they act, you should know how many subscribers acted. Open rate – how many email subscribers opened. Unsubscribe rate – the number of people who no longer your subscribers. Bounce rate — the number of emails that have not been delivered to the subscribers.

Common video e-mail marketing questions

Many people ask how to embed videos to your email. The thing is that it does not work like this. The thumbnail indicates that there is a video on the letter, but to watch it, people have to visit the external link – to your website, in particular. Even though the video is better than text – we still recommend not to avoid the text entirely in your email marketing campaign.

Write a few words in the head of the letter to make people some preview – what did you send them out and what you offer them to watch. The meaning people ascribe to pictures not always the same. That is why you should give some explanation in a written form. The critical question for many people is whether to make video autoplay or not. Some viewers find this very good option – watching experience starts immediately. Other viewers find it distracting and irritating. There is no way to make another solution – it’s always one way or another. We recommend to let people decide when to watch a video – without autoplay. But if you feel like autoplay should be there anyway, at least turn the sound off.

Make the video available for mobile. Mobile devices are more often used, so it is even more essential to make the best use of video for mobile requirements before you think of those for a computer. The question brands face in relation to the thumbnails is the following: should it be animated or not? Animated thumbnails are easier to catch the viewer’s attention.

The statics says that it leads to the way more clicks than simple images. To implement such a thing to your email, marketing strategy is a good thing. GIF is very easy to make, and all the popular email clients support them. Of course, there is no reason for making them all the time to every single email. GIFs have become very popular not due to some fashion; they are actually working for many marketing reasons. It’s better to embed videos from your website. Popular video hosting platforms, like YouTube or Vimeo, could be useful, but you are going to generate traffic for these platforms. It’s barely your goal.

The point of email marketing is to increase traffic on your website. Besides, you can’t rely on other sites because you never entirely in control of your video. It could lead to possible inconveniences for the clients. For instance, the platform that you chose to post your video can delete it at some point.