How to Use Video in Your Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most popular strategies within digital marketing and in 2019, over 293 billion emails were sent… per day.

Video marketing is a younger trend, but over the past few years it has grown at an astonishing rate. To the point that right now, in 2020, 85% of businesses use it in their digital strategy.

You might be one of the business-owners who takes advantage of both email marketing and video content in order to grow your online presence. And if you’re not… it’s something to think about.

But, have you ever thought about bringing the two strategies together and including video in your emails and newsletters?

It might seem like a ludicrous idea at first. But we promise that by the end of this article you’ll have countless video email marketing ideas bubbling up in your mind.

Read on!

Why Should You Use Video in Your Emails?

Before we get into the “how” of video email marketing, it’s important that we go through the “why”.

After all, you need to have a good reason to invest your team’s time and effort into adding video to your email marketing.

Luckily, there are more than enough reasons that will convince you of just how powerful this strategy is, including the following three:

It can boost your SEO efforts

The email in itself won’t do much for your rankings. But you might experience an indirect effect because of how shareable this type of content is.

In fact, videos tend to generate 12 times more social shares than text or images.

Needless to say, you’ll have to put in work in order to create a video that people will want to share. You can do so by making sure it is engaging, creative, and relevant to your target.

If you manage to make a video that ticks all those boxes, you increase your chances of getting shares on social media. Which in turn may boost the visibility of your content and indirectly improve your search engine rankings.

Additionally, if you embed the video in the email, each time a user watches it, your view count goes up. This will also help you rank your video even better on the platform that you chose to host it.

It can improve your email marketing metrics

According to a study conducted by Sezion, when you include video in your emails you can increase your click-through rate by 55%. And you make users spend 44% more time reading it, which will help you improve your conversion rate by 24%.

Need we say more?!

Since video is so engaging and easy to consume, people won’t mind spending a few minutes listening to what you have to say. And if you use your ‘air time’ cleverly, you can increase brand affinity and increase the likelihood they become consumers.

All of this would be possible with text content, of course, but you’d have a harder task in hands!

Users love visual content

We said it before and we’ll say it again. When it comes to digital content, video is as easy to consume as it gets. And that explains why most users love it and want more of it.

As a business with an online presence, it’s important that you always keep two things in mind:

1. People are always on the go and have little time to hear your message unless you know how to convince them.
2. Competition is fierce on the World Wide Web and if you don’t work hard to stand out, you’ll quickly be eaten by your competitors.

The moral of the story is simple: users want easy content and it doesn’t get much easier than clicking play and watching a video.

3 Easy Ways of Adding Video to an Email

We mentioned before that there are several ways to go about including video in your emails. If that made you a bit confused, worry not, we’re about to explain exactly what we meant.

1. Image with a Play Button

Contrary to what you might be thinking right now, you don’t necessarily need to include the video itself in your email. You just need to make sure that your subscribers understand clearly that there is a video they can watch.

Using a static image with a play button on top is a foolproof way of doing so.

All you need to do is take a (high-quality, interesting-looking) screenshot of the video and put a play symbol on top (which you can do in a matter of minutes using an online image editor).

Save it, add it to the email as you would with any other image, and voilà!

2. GIF

Most email clients support GIFs, so creating one to work as the video in your email is also a great alternative. GIFs in email marketing is great.

It is a bit trickier than using a static image. You’ll need to learn how to create the GIF from the video, but it is also more engaging and captivating than the image.

The good news is that nowadays there are plenty of GIF creating tools online and many are even free to use. A few examples you could look into are GIPHY’s GIF maker, Make a GIF and GIMP.

3. Embedded Video

Lastly, you can choose to embed the actual video in the email, by editing your email HTML code.

However, this third option comes with a few drawbacks.

Firstly, you need to consider which email clients the majority of your subscribers use. Because some of these clients don’t support video content yet (including big ones, like Gmail and Outlook, which show a fallback image instead). And if people can’t even see that there’s a video in the email, all your efforts will be in vain.

Secondly, you need to look at the size of the video (no matter how short it is). If it is too heavy, it will slow down the loading speed and cause many subscribers to give up on watching it.

Lastly, along with embedding the video, you’ll have to implement custom click tracking. That way you can keep up with how many subscribers actually click play and watch until the end.

7 Tips for Using Video in Your Email Marketing (& Getting Users to Actually Click “Play”)

Now that you know why you should adopt video email marketing and how you can add the videos, it’s time to learn the pro-tips! With these tips, your subscribers will click play, making your time and effort worth it.

1. Use the word “video” in the subject line

We didn’t mention it before but the benefits of using video in your email marketing strategy start before the subscriber even opens your email.

In fact, it can boost your open rate by 19%. All you need to do is make sure you include the word “video” in your subject line.

As we established earlier, users are such big fans of video content. Adding the word will grab their attention and make them feel curious as to what’s inside the video.

If you don’t have a creative way of including the word in the subject line, don’t worry. You can simply put in brackets or in caps at the beginning of the subject, like so:

2. Use a creative thumbnail

Getting users to open your email is only phase one of this marketing mission. Phase two is getting them to click play and watch your video. One of the main strategies here is to pick your thumbnail carefully.

Think about it, when you scroll through YouTube, there are some thumbnails that grab your attention way more than others.

Why is that? What do those thumbnails have that many others lack? And how can you apply that to your industry and target audience?

Since we’re talking about thumbnails, remember to adjust the size and compress them before you add them to the video. You don’t want to send an email that is too heavy and too slow.

3. Don’t forget the CTA

Each of your video campaigns as a business goal.

You need to be clear about what you want from the viewer, both in the video and out. Whether you want users to buy your products, attend an event, enroll in a course, or watch a webinar, tell them.

That’s exactly where a good CTA will come in handy.

Remember the best practices when it comes to creating CTAs; That it needs to be compelling, well-designed, strategically placed, and easy to find. Do that and you’ll be just fine!

4. Include written content

People love videos, but they might be in a situation where watching one isn’t an option.

Perhaps they don’t have time at that moment. Or they can’t put the sound on. Whatever the reason might be, you need to make sure that you get the message across by including some text around your video.

Additionally, this piece of text (when placed before the video) might also work as the last push someone needs to click play. It’s almost certain that some of your subscribers will need some context before they take some of their time to listen to you.

This means, of course, that your copywriting needs to be just as good as your video, so take some time to create it!

5. Keep it short

33% of users stop watching a video after the 30-second mark, 45% after the one-minute mark, and 60% after the two-minute mark.

That alone gives you a pretty good idea of the maximum amount of minutes your video should last for. And it also means two things:

1. The beginning of the video needs to be excellent because people are very quick to click “pause”. It needs to be entertaining enough to contradict this trend.
2. If what you have to say needs to last more than two minutes, it’s best for you to break the content into several videos. And, consequently, several emails. Not only will this make it easier for your subscribers to hear your message. But it will also drip the content for a longer period of time, which is a great way to build up the relationship.

6. Make it mobile-friendly

Over 50% of all video consumption is mobile, and up to 77% of all emails are opened on a mobile device.

As such, it’s easy to understand why your emails with video need to optimized for smartphones.

Not considering how your video will play on mobile devices is bad. It might mean giving up on a big portion of your potential opens, clicks, and conversions. Which defeats the purpose of this whole thing!

7. Measure the results

Any campaign you create and strategy you add to your online presence needs to be monitored. Otherwise, how will you know if it is working or if it needs to be adjusted?

Both the email marketing tool you use and the platform where you host your videos should provide you with comprehensive reports. They should show all the important metrics for you to understand. Use these to decide where to take your video email marketing strategy. And if they don’t, it might be time to look for new ones.

All you need to do is view them regularly and assess which changes need to be tested to improve results.

Ready to Take Your Email Marketing to a New Level?

We gave you all the tips and tricks you needed to start including video content in your emails. And now it’s time for you to put them in action. Do things right and we can guarantee that you’ll start to notice results and your brand will grow like never before. Good luck!