How To Leverage Video In Email Marketing?

Last updated on March 5, 2020

As the saying goes, “A picture speaks more than a thousand words”, but what about a video? Well, studies show that most videos are recorded in 30 frames per second. Videos can play an import role in email marketing. In short, a tremendous place that allows you to use video content to a large extent.

Yes, humans are visual creatures.

This means that we resonate better with visual content, are more likely to carefully consume it, and are more impacted by it.

Well, a study found that, since most videos are recorded in 30 frames per second, it would mean that 1 second of video equals 30,000 words. This would also mean that a minute’s video translates to 1.8 million.

When you understand just how powerful this is, you understand that if you’re not leveraging video content, you’re missing out.

Humans process visual content a lot better than text, in fact, 600,000 faster than text. Furthermore, 90% of the information absorbed in the brain is visual.

As a marketer, your goal is to educate your customers about your brand and let them know about your products in order to ultimately convince them to buy, and when you have the fact that people learn a lot better through video content in mind, leveraging it in all marketing tactics you can is a given.

Email marketing is, in fact, a tremendous place that allows you to use video content to a large extent, and the limits for you to implement video into your emails are few.

If you aren’t yet using video content in your marketing emails, continue reading.

Why you need to use videos in your email marketing

Most have already been revealed, but there are more reasons why you should use video content in your emails apart from just the fact that we humans are visual creatures.

Today, essentially all brands leverage email marketing, and this means that the competition is tougher than ever. At the same time, we’re also seeing a continued decrease of email open-rates as a result, because everyone is bombarding your email inbox, and there’s just not enough time to carefully consume them all.

This means that in order to succeed with email marketing, you cannot continue to rely on the email practices that used to work. You need new approaches to cut through the noise.

The answer is video content.

In fact, simply using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19%. It also reduces unsubscribe instances by 26%.

1. Create a series of videos for email marketing

As a marketer, you’re always fighting to get people’s attention and keep it.

A great way to do just that is to create a series of videos and then create series of emails where you send out the different “episodes” or “parts” to your audience.

You know when watching a super exciting and interesting episode of a series, and then the episode ends right before the most interesting part, in other words, leaves you with a cliffhanger.

Of course, it’s no coincidence that the movie makers do this because now, you’ll go around wondering what will happen next, but most importantly, you’ll go around longing for the next episode, and you’ll sit glued to your screen once it comes out.

A similar principle can be leveraged in your video email marketing.

A challenge for marketers is always to get their audience to open their emails and value them greatly, but with the increased competition, getting people to do so is a challenge, to say the least.

The most important part when doing this is obviously the video you send out to your audience when doing this. Your video needs to be engaging, attention-grabbing, but most importantly, it needs to encourage people to continue watching.

Start by sending out the first episode, and then let people know the date and time when the next episode will come. Further, ask your recipients to add your email to their contacts to prevent your emails from ending up in spam, because what you’ll notice is that many people will, at least if your video is interesting, as a result of the fear of missing out that humans have.

Now, implementing videos into your email can be a challenge and has long been so for marketers who just don’t have the expertise, but using SendPulse, you need no previous expertise or knowledge, whether it be in coding or designing. The drag and drop builder lets you effortlessly implement videos wherever you want in a matter of seconds.

2.Create product videos

The goal of almost all email marketing campaigns is to ultimately get people to convert and buy. But what happens when 50 other companies send us emails trying to get us to buy as well?

Well, we tend to be harder to convince.

This is where using videos to educate your customers is a huge advantage.

First off, as you know, humans learn a lot more by watching video content compared to just reading. What’s more, 65 percent of the population consists of visual learners, and this means that you can educate your customers much better with a video.

And after all, in first hand, the goal isn’t to get people to convert on the spot, because first, they need to go through the different stages of the conversion funnel before they are ready to buy.

“A picture speaks more than a thousand words”, but what about a video? Well, studies show that 1 second of video equals 30,000 words. Videos can play a vital role in email marketing too! via pvariel.com

But the best part is that since people learn better through visual content, you can leverage video to first educate them about your products. Obviously, if your customers can’t see the value of your products, or even understand what they are any good for, you can’t expect them to buy from you. But by leveraging video, you can show them just that, and therefore, make them more likely to ultimately buy from you.

Most marketers just include images of their products in their marketing emails, but with the fact that video content is much more powerful in mind, you’re missing out if you aren’t leveraging it.

This is also why you want to implement a call to action button into your email campaign using SendPulse, right next to your video, so that when your recipients have watched the video, are convinced about the benefits of your products, and ready to buy, they know exactly where they should go.

SendPulse gives you full control over how your CTA button and how it looks, where it should be placed, size, and everything in between.

3.Include the word “video” in your subject line

This is a very simple hack, but one that has proven to be quite effective.

As you know from the statistic I presented earlier, simply using the word “video” in your email subject line increases your open-rate by 19%. This is something worth having in mind and putting into practice because the foundation for getting great results from your email marketing campaigns is getting people to actually open your emails because this creates the precondition for them to even be impacted by your message.

But have in mind, however, that you can’t just include the word in your subject line and then just have no video in your email.

That would mean creating false hopes, and ultimately, it would mean harming people’s trust in you, because you create expectations but then don’t live up to that.

Make sure that if you include the word video in your subject line, that you also include a video in your email.

4.Embed your video and include an image from your video with a play button on top of it

A “mistake” that marketers make when looking to use video content in their emails is that they link out to some external source where people can find their videos, such as YouTube or Vimeo. If you do this, you’ll experience a significant drop-off in the people who open your email, even clicks your link, and most importantly, proceeds to watch your video.

r Embedding your video into your email has a huge positive effect on the number of people who watch it because if people have your email opened anyways, and your video right in front of them, why not just click it, as opposed to having to go through several steps just to watch it. The more complicated you make the process of watching your video, the fewer people actually will. And you’re obviously not creating videos because don’t want people to watch it.

Okay, so embedding your videos into your email is key. In doing this, you want to make it as appealing as possible for your audience to start watching it, and a tip you’ll see all over the web is to include a screenshot of your video and then add a play button on top” to create a visual indication that a video is part of your email and to encourage people to click it.

But in doing this, what you’re doing is directing people to another page, and people don’t like that.

Fortunately, there’s a solution that’s much easier and more effective, and it is called SendPulse. With the drag and drop tool, there’s no need to take screenshots, design a play button, add it to your email, then add an external link to the actual video.

Instead, with the drag and drop editor, you can effortlessly decide where in the email you want to have your video, and then, embed the video into your email using a simple link. Doing this will add the play button automatically, which shows that there’s a video and that people should click play, but the best part is that through the embedding, the video plays inside of the email, as opposed to forcing people to another site.

Published on: May 30, 2018