Unless you’re offering a deep discount to a targeted set of customers or are launching a revolutionary product with respect to your existing portfolio, email campaigns to your current install-base and prospective customer lists can often times have minimal impact on your immediate sales or short-term objective. In many cases, your customers are flooded with emails from both known and unknown companies every day. When they open your marketing email they may very well skim over it or delete it all together and move on to the next one.
However, when there is a video embedded in your marketing emails, customers are more likely to open them and watch the video. In fact, according to HubSpot adding a video to an email leads to a 200-300% increase in click-through rates. Just remember that when you highlight that your email contains a video you’ll want to make sure the quality of it meets the brand expectations of your targeted recipients.
Video Helps You Track Your Email Marketing ROI
Unless people are unsubscribing, which is the worst possible outcome, it’s generally difficult to determine the full success of an email marketing campaign beyond open and click-through rates. You can review conversion rates and goals and look at increases in purchases or traffic, but those may be caused by things other than your email such as social media posts, referred traffic or a change in your search engine rank. Plus, they simply don’t tell you if your message was heard by those that didn’t take a measurable action above and beyond just opening it.
Beyond standard email marketing metrics and view counts, emails with embedded videos hosted on leading video platforms such as Wistia, can provide in depth viewership data such as when a specific person stopped watching, if they re-watched it and where they re-watched. That data alone will help you strengthen your marketing messages to improve the conversion rate for your future email marketing investments. If you’re trying to convey a complex technology and notice a trend in drop-off or re-watch rates around a specific feature, it may be an indication that you need to further test your message or re-work it altogether for that specific feature. In addition, platforms like Wistia can integrate with leading marketing platforms such as Marketo and Salesforce Pardot and push data straight into some customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Videos Is More Memorable Than Plain Text
The fundamental purpose of email communication is to directly provide people with information. Video is a great way to deliver a message and improve information retention from your target recipients. It’s also important to remember that many people struggle with reading comprehension when it comes to mass market emails because they’re both busy and constantly being bombarded with email noise. Video has proven to be different. In the B2B space, people prefer it, especially those with limited time. And with it, you know that your message is being heard and understood exactly as you intend it to be.
If you have an announcement, such as a launch of a new product or software update, video is the best way to ensure your customers see and hear that information and retain it. It’s also an excellent way to put a real face behind your brand and build trust through virtual human engagement. If you’re a technology company and want to really maximize your video’s effectiveness, we recommend that you use someone from your product management or software development teams to deliver it. If you’re actively investing in email marketing, there’s a good chance you’re also investing in Webinars. If you aren’t you should be! The point we’re trying to convey is that when you host a webinar, people aren’t just attending to see your marketing messages, they’re there to hear the people responsible for your product or service directly deliver the message. Using video adds a whole new dimension to this type of subliminal perception that everyone, including ourselves, is susceptible to. Video is, quite simply, more engaging and memorable for people than emails that only contain plain text and stock images.
Video Email Alone Doesn’t Ensure Success
Factors that could impact the success of your campaign can include the overall quality of the video, such as the sound and the editing. With so much video content available online these days, people have a higher standard of quality. Low-quality amateur video can make your company look unprofessional and have a negative impact on your overall brand perception. Partnering with a video production company or a videographer can help ensure that the quality matches your viewers’ expectations.
Another contributing factor would be how fine-tuned and segmented your email list is. A mass email is still a mass email and if the information you’re trying to provide isn’t relevant to the recipient, they may very well ignore the message. Even in this type of scenario adding video will most likely increase your open rates, but if you’re, for example, sending a product technology video about a new development board available to your OEM partners, your traditional VAR partners will most likely have no interest in it. And an even more damaging outcome of sending non-segmented emails is that it may diminish their likelihood of opening future emails from you, even if they are relevant.
At the end of the day, embedding video in your emails will have a positive effect on your email marketing campaign success and is worth testing. Just remember to always follow best practices for both email marketing and video marketing when combining the two.
About The Author
Peter Horton is a co-founder of Telideo, a full-service Denver video production company and video marketing agency that specializes in producing online videos for businesses. At Telideo we believe that video is the future of content marketing and our mission is to make high-quality and engaging video content accessible to companies and organizations of all sizes.