Before we get started, I quickly want to mention some stats about what impact can video have on your email marketing campaign as reported by Campaign Monitor:

  • Increase open rates by 19%
  • Boost click-through rates by 65%
  • Decrease unsubscribes by 26%
  • Optimize the email open rate by 272% when the word “video” is included in the subject line

The numbers are substantial, especially when the world seeks a ray of hope and resurgence. With every business, irrespective of the scale and size, taking the digital path, including videos in email marketing, will be a decisive factor for your email campaigns fate. But how to leverage this trend to the T?

So, here are the six best practices to follow if you want to ride the wave of video email marketing and give your endeavors a new high. Let’s get started!

Make your emails more personalized

Does your website have surplus video content? You can take advantage of it and send personalized emails. For example, if you notice that your visitors are watching only a portion of a video on your website and don’t finish, then you can feature that video in an email to remind them to finish it off.

Professional services such as Mailchimp email experts or Salesforce email specialist would make it a breeze for you. To put into context, as per a Vidyard report, “The personalized video email (which Marketo sent to their subscribers) generated a 36% increase in open rate and a 144% bump in click-through rate compared to the other emails the team sent to promote the event.”

This practice benefits both ends of the spectrum. As a subscriber, I would feel important that I was sent an email with the video I had to leave in between. More video watch time translates to more clicks, better brand image, and positive sentiment around the brand.

Exhibit your company’s culture

Videos are the best way to show off your company’s personality. As much as today’s customer is interested in great products, they also want to know what goes into making them great. Moreover, your email marketing strategy shouldn’t be an outright show of just your product lineup. Sometimes, you also need to promote your offerings in a way that echoes your company culture. To create such videos you can take the help of an online video editor that helps you create and edit your videos just like a pro with minimum expenditure.

Talking about exhibiting the company culture, this email from Knotel nails this feat. Well, it’s a co-working firm, offering workspaces to other brands. So, they have played around this sentiment to hit the right chord with the audience.

The newsletter features a video with an enticing thumbnail right at the beginning. Once the video has made an impact on the mind of the recipient, the following content would enhance the appeal of the email. The overall content and design of the mail are also in-sync with the B2B model adopted by the co-working firm. The design is minimal with bright colors to create a positive sentiment around the email and eventually around the brand.  

Source: Really Good Emails

Announce a product line or launch

If you have a product launch scheduled for the upcoming quarter, you must involve your email subscribers in the pre-launch phase to create more buzz. If it is a new CRM update, for instance, then inform your email subscribers first. This would make your dedicated customers express their notions about the product and create that ‘oh-so-valuable-yet-underrated’ word-of-mouth marketing.

If you are a product design company, then what’s better than sending a design-led email to your clientele and featuring an interactive video in it? Well, that’s exactly what Robust Designs have done in this email which they sent to their entire B2B clientele to highlight the importance of a good landing page. Their product ‘Message by Robust Designs’ is all about visual communication and the email delivers just that.

Be it the subject line or the copy – “Beauty is in the details,” every aspect of this email enhances the appeal of visual elements in branding, thereby establishing the value proposition of their offering. The content too plays an equally beautiful role in delivering the message in the most effective manner possible.

Source: Really Good Emails

Send out newsletters

If your newsletters used to go without videos, then you were missing out big. Videos can be seamlessly integrated into a newsletter in numerous ways to make them useful. If your user base prefers to watch than reading and you are a video-oriented business, it’s obvious to send them the video in an email instead of heavy text.

One more trick that you can have up your sleeve is rounding-up popular videos of your industry in your newsletters. This technique is especially magical if you don’t create much video content in-house. For instance, if a commercial recently went viral, then feature it in your email with an accompanying blog post about what you as a brand think about it. This way, you are leveraging that commercial’s popularity to drive more traffic to your blog.

Include video in email subject lines

Email marketing demands superior formatting standards, and it all begins with the subject line. For instance, as a subscriber, seeing an email in my inbox with emojis in the subject line will instantly hook me up to open that email since they stand out and trigger more emotional value.

Hence, while featuring a video in your email, you should mention “video” or a related emoji in your subject line for a higher open rate. It’s better if you A/B test multiple subject lines before shooting the mails to have a clear idea about your readers’ preferences.

Last but not the least, practice to follow is embedding the email video in a place that gets the most user attention. Placing it at the beginning sounds all good, but if you keep a video at the end of your email, it will entice the readers to continue reading to understand the video better1.

Use videos for subscribers delight

Though video inclusion in emails is on the rise, it’s still a new entrant in the email marketing ecosystem. There’s some time before videos in emails would become mainstream. Hence, when you send a video to a subscriber, it radiates a sense of an occasion and enhances their delight. You can utilize some of your email marketing bandwidth to provide bonus content to your subscribers.

Here is a brilliant example of how Wistia, the popular audio and video content platform and digital marketing brand, has leveraged videos to the T in their email marketing campaign. The mail just landed in my inbox this morning.

Through this email, Wistia is empowering their clientele while they also reveal the new features their product has to offer. Video is the best-suited medium for such communication since nothing comes close to video when it is about empowering and enlightening the audience about a brand. They have a different level of impact altogether.

Moreover, the entire email content including the copy and the body feels natural and in-sync with the overall tonality of this B2B email marketing example.

Also, notice how the dark-colored theme goes well with a contrasting call to action button.

Now since we are familiar with videos and their impact in email marketing, especially in a B2B model, let me shed some light on the tools which are at the mainstay of the digital marketing ecosystem – CRMs. And today, we’ll get to know about OroCRM.

About the OroCRM – The next generation of CRM software

A good CRM software is every digital marketer’s dream and OroCRM is one of the finest email marketing tools in recent times. The software incorporates the latest offerings that the new-age digital marketing requires and then some more.

OroCRM is differentiated by its adaptability to any business model. Be it a single or multi-channel business that is focused on B2B, B2C, or even both the modus operandi, the CRM is capable of handling and harnessing any form of business workflow. Not only that, OroCRM boasts of an open-source CRM architecture with a highly sophisticated Features dashboard. These features empower your marketing campaigns for optimizing business operations, monitoring conversions, enhancing sales, and eventually leading to higher customer satisfaction.

Wrapping up

So, these were some of the most impactful and impressive tactics to make videos an integral part of your email marketing strategy. Remember, the primary format of content consumption changes once every 3-5 years. We have transitioned from reading newspapers to blogs and now watching videos while the future lies in podcasts. So, leverage this trend as much as you can and consider the points mentioned above to give your email marketing strategy that extra edge. We have transitioned from texts to videos when it comes to content consumption and hence, they will be an integral part of any marketing endeavor, at least for the foreseeable future.