In our last blog post, we discussed the importance of video marketing as a whole, as well as how businesses could benefit from it. We briefly touched on the effect of adding a video to your emails every so often has and how it can help your videos perform better. For example, we discussed how adding videos to your emails can increase their click rates by 300% and can help draw email subscribers to your website and social media profiles [1].
With the integration of video and email marketing increasing, your business should consider doing the same. Here are some other statistics about using video in your email, who else is using it, and how it can boost engagement:
- Simply using the word “video” in the subject line of an email boosts the email open rate by 19% (on average) [2].
- Having the word “video” in the email subject line can also increase click-through rates by 65% [3].
- The number of businesses using video in emails (which might include your competitors) jumped from 36% to 46% in 2018 alone [4].
- According to EmailMonks, video email marketing provides a return 280% higher than traditional emails [5].
- Using video in email helps increase site traffic, which can affect SEO and the site’s clickthrough rate.
How to Use Videos in Your Emails
You might be wondering which emails you should insert your videos into. You actually have several different options, which include email blasts, triggered emails, targeted emails, nurture emails, event invite emails, event follow-up emails, customer communication emails, email newsletters, and even the email signatures. Essentially, you should place videos in any email where your goal is to increase the open rate and/or conversion rate.
Once you start incorporating video marketing with email marketing, remember to implement the following practices:
- Include the word “video” in brackets at the beginning of the email’s subject line. As previously mentioned above, using the word “video” in the subject line increases the open rate.
- Insert the video below the email copy. Please note: if the only purpose of the email is to send the video, be sure to use copy to explain and introduce the video content (with the copy able to explain enough on it’s own in the instance that the video doesn’t show up for some reason). Sending the video by itself will appear spammy.
- Enable autoplay with the sound turned off. Email recipients who click the thumbnail will expect the video to play immediately, but keeping the sound off initially allows people without headphones to watch the video in a quiet office without disturbing their coworkers.
- Add video captions. If someone chooses to watch the video without the sound, or if they are partially or fully deaf, they will still get the video’s message.
- Use an animated thumbnail (when you can and it makes sense to). Animated thumbnails get more clicks than static images do, and they don’t require much to insert into an email. Keep in mind not all email platforms/clients support animated thumbnails, but most do.
- Reduce the size of that thumbnail.
Film the video to fit the medium it will be viewed on (desktop vs mobile device). - Have your sales team use videos in their emails.
- A/B test and measure your email analytic results.
Barge Marketing is in the process of producing more professional videos for our clients in 2020. We’ll be shooting and editing both live videos and animation videos that our clients can use on their website, social media, and, of course, link to videos in emails. (More on animation videos in a future post.)
For more information on how Barge Marketing can provide video marketing for your business, call us at 614-401-8800, or visit our Contact Us page to submit your question. In the meantime, you can watch our podcast series on YouTube for information concerning our overall digital marketing services.
Sources: 1, 2018’s Most Insightful Email Marketing Statistics; 2, 40+ Video Marketing Statistics 2018 [Infographic]; 3, Video Email Marketing: How to Embed Video in Email; 4, 25 New Video Marketing Statistics to Fuel Your Strategy in 2019; 5, Video Email Arsenal.