Email marketing is one of the most cost effective advertising methods around. However, your email open rate may still hover around a few percentage points.
There are ways to improve your recipient engagement and increase the likelihood of a customer opening your email. A huge one…is through the aid of videos. No surprise there!
By using video in emails, you’ll not only increase the probability of someone opening and viewing your email, but on following the call to action as well.
Here are four steps to help you use video in emails to increase engagement from your leads:
- The word “Video” in the subject line boosts open rates.
- Including an image with a play button boosts click-through rates.
- Landing pages with videos earn more conversions.
- Personalized videos take email marketing to the next level.
1. THE WORD “VIDEO” IN THE SUBJECT LINE BOOSTS OPEN RATES.
Email recipients don’t want to spend all day reading through a long pitch email. They have other things they need to get done. However, if they know your email contains a video they may give it a try.
After all, with a video they can watch for a few seconds and then decide if they want to stick around or not. You just need to let the email recipient know there is a video within the message. That is why you need to include the world “Video” in the email subject line.
As we’ve mentioned before on the show, emails with the word “Video” in the subject line experience an open-rate increase of 19% and a click-through rate of 65%!
2. INCLUDE AN IMAGE WITH A PLAY BUTTON FOR MORE CLICKS.
There’s something about seeing a play button that makes people want to click on it. The impulse is so difficult to resist that YouTube used it in a clever (if controversial) baseball ad recently.
This is true even if the email itself doesn’t contain a video in it. In fact, embedding a video within the email likely isn’t the best way to go.
For one thing, this creates an email that is far too large. If someone is on a cellular network and viewing your email on their phone, it may take too long to open and load, which increases the chances of abandoning your email all together.
Of course, that’s a best-case scenario. Large files often get flagged by email providers as spam. So, at worst, sending the video file in your email could get you blacklisted, and your message won’t even get to your viewers.
However, if you format an image to look like a video (as in, have the same display dimensions as a video) and include a play button over top, recipients are more likely to click on the image than if the image didn’t have the play button.
The image should then send email recipients to a landing page or another part of your website that has the video queued up to play.
Never send someone to YouTube or Vimeo if you can help it. The purpose is to send individuals to your website. Sending someone over to YouTube won’t help boost sales.
3. LANDING PAGES WITH VIDEOS EARN MORE CONVERSIONS.
Consumers are far more likely to not only watch videos, but also share them. According to eMarketer, 92% of all mobile video consumers share videos with others. Additionally, 95% of viewers will take in and remember more information from videos than if they were to simply read the content.
Beyond sharing videos, placing videos directly on your landing page will help drive up traffic and conversion rates. Based off of research conducted by Eye View Digital, landing pages with videos experience an 80% increase in engagement over the same landing pages without video content.
4. PERSONALIZED VIDEOS TAKE EMAIL MARKETING TO THE NEXT LEVEL.
Having videos in the contents of your email (as well as mentioning the inclusion of a video within your email subject line) helps dramatically boost conversions and click-through rates. However, one of the most beneficial techniques when using video in emails to increase engagement is to personalize the content.
According to Vidyard, businesses experience up to a 500% boost in email conversion rates when personalized videos are included within the body of the message.
The main reason behind this kind of success is the appearance increased time it probably took to create such a video. Email recipients have become accustomed to personalized emails, but in video form this takes it to an entirely new level.
It shows you put more effort into reaching out.
Now, if you have a handful of high-end clients, you can exclusively record personalized videos where you talk directly to them. (That’s a great example of account-based marketing at its finest.)
However, for the vast majority of your emails, you won’t need to do this. Instead, you can quickly add in the individual’s name into the video. There are a number of ways you can do this, ranging from recording yourself saying popular names, so you can have it edited and rendered on file. Or, you can use a program that allows you to place personalized names and information onto white boards and other titles on the video itself.
In the world of email marketing, a little bit of effort really can go a long way.
It doesn’t take much to bring videos to the forefront of the marketing message, and the results are well-worth it! Recipients are more likely to watch a short video than read through stuffy chunks of text.
The option to watch a short one or two-minute video can be the difference between someone who passes on your message, and someone who subscribes. So if you’re ready to take your manufacturing emails to the next level of success, now is the time to fully take advantage of video in emails to increase engagement for your company.
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