When it comes to digital marketing, Email Marketing stands as an evergreen and one of the most used methods to promote something. With new developments in the web technologies, these email-based marketing newsletters have become a lot more interactive and informative.

Did you know that videos have become a significant source of the way we consume information online? A lot of companies find success on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. The best thing about email marketing campaigns today is that you can customize your campaign newsletters to the last strain and add elements such as GIFs, videos and more.

Also Read: How To Do Email Marketing With The New Gmail

A report from back in 2016 reveals that adding a video in a newsletter can boost your open rate by 19% and your click-through rate by 200 to 300%. Such a boost in numbers can bring significant improvements to your campaigns, and you will be able to interact with your mailing list in a better way.

In this article, let us have a look at the prospects of videos in email marketing and how you can easily set up a campaign with a video for more conversions or open rate.

Email Marketing with Videos – Why?

We did mention a bunch of reasons in the introduction as to why one can try experimenting with videos in an email marketing campaign. But to understand why videos have become a powerful tool in this sector, we need to look at some significant reasons in detail.

Videos are a Time Saver!

When it comes to writing an effective newsletter copy that attracts the receiver’s attention, one has to spend a lot of time optimizing and trimming down the text content to as little as required.

But with the addition of a video to your campaign newsletters, not only will you be able to interact with the receivers in a better way, but you can also creatively provide more information. A lot of companies take advantage of explainer videos to introduce a new product or to upsell something.

These explainer videos can also be used to introduce a new procedure or in a newsletter series where you have to inform the receivers about something one by one. The possibilities of how one can use videos in an email marketing campaign are endless. One can save a lot of time with a video where they can use videos instead of a written copy to explain more things.

Instant Boost in CTR & Conversion Rates

Adding a video in an email marketing campaign can significantly boost the CTR. We talked about this in the introduction but to discuss further on this topic, more CTR means a better chance of converting to a successful lead/sale.

As per some statistics shared by HubSpot, campaigns with videos in their email marketing campaigns saw a significant spike in the conversion. Campaigns that used videos in their newsletters had a conversion rate of 4.8% as compared to the 2.9% that the campaigns without videos.

Connect with your Audience on a Human Level

It has been noticed that consumers respond well to companies that have some human element to them. Taking an example out of content, Wendy’s Twitter account can be seen tweeting and replying to people with human humor which not only makes the brand more friendly but also adds a very nice impression on potential customers.

Imagine doing the same with a series of videos planned on a topic. Such email marketing campaigns can achieve great results.

One example of this is Marie Forleo. She uses email marketing campaigns to drive traffic to videos like the one below.

Just head over to YouTube and check how people have responded to her video in the comments. Such videos create a human connection between you and your audience making your company stands out from the rest.

Better CTA – Boost your Brand Pages

In a report by Business 2 Community, it is revealed that pages with videos get about 94% more views as compared to pages with text-only content. Of course, this is an obvious fact since videos have become such a huge part of what we do online. A large chunk of our online clock time is spent on websites such as YouTube & Vimeo. Watching a YouTube or a Vimeo video in an email marketing newsletter is bound to drive curious audience members to your pages on YouTube and Vimeo. This is a huge benefit as you’re driving traffic directly to your pages where you can gather the attention that people have to offer and promote your brand.

Videos also provide a huge gateway to better call to actions, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time with scrabble trying to find out better words for these CTAs.

Getting Started with Videos for your Campaigns

Almost every email marketing service such as MailChimp, A weber, Constant Contact, etc. allow adding videos to your newsletters. In this section of the post, we will see how one can easily set up campaigns with videos.

Baby Steps

The first thing that you need to do while adding a video to your campaign is research and planning. This is the step that is going to define the end goal of using videos in your newsletters. You can set your targets but keep in mind that the videos that work best with your campaign will be the one you produce specifically for the purpose.

This means getting the video(s) ready as per your planning and then creating a newsletter around that. We will discuss some of the best practices for this in the next section.

Best Practices & Tips

Any step you take towards marketing something online requires proper research and use of proven things that work best. This is exactly the reason why people follow a certain set of guidelines while performing SEO.

This also stands true for video-based email marketing. This is because just adding a video in a newsletter will barely get you any results until you are doing it correctly. Let us take a look at how you can adequately add videos to your newsletters.

Embedding Videos in a Newsletter

With the modern web technologies available today, it has never been easier to add videos in a newsletter. But keep in mind that this has a few quirks in today’s mobile-first world. While adding videos in newsletter works fine for Gmail users, this might not be true for users on platforms like Outlook, etc.

The reason for this is the fact that apps for these services aren’t capable of showing videos inside an email. But to fix that, you can use services such as Viwo mail. Services like these use HTML5 to embed and auto play (you can turn it off) videos in your email.

Services like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor etc. have added native support for videos through third-party websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and more but embedding videos through HTML5 makes more sense. Alternatively, instead of adding a video directly to the email, you can add an animated GIF to drive traffic to some other page that hosts the video.

Using GIFs to Drive Traffic to Video Page

If your primary target is to drive traffic on a page where you are hosting your video, then adding a GIF instead of a video might make more sense. Not only can you drive traffic to your YouTube page (or any other brand page for that matter), but you can also drive traffic to a landing page where you can engage a user and convert them in a lead/sale.

This can be achieved by using a static image with a simple play button but we all know how dynamic creatives can gather more attention and this is precisely why GIFs come very close to adding a video in an email.

To Autoplay or Not – That is the question!

While adding a video that auto-plays as soon as the page loads are very annoying and it is also frowned upon by audiences, auto-playing a video in a newsletter is perfectly fine as gathering a user’s attention as soon as they open the email is of utmost importance.

Wrapping it up!

To summarize what we discussed here, let us take a look at the points mentioned in the article one by one.

Videos in Email Marketing Campaigns can boost CTR by 200-300% & Conversion by 4.8%

You can use videos in your campaigns to humanize your brand

Videos provide an excellent gateway for promoting your social media channels such as YouTube & Facebook

Starting a video-based email marketing campaign is very easy and saves time

GIFs perform better when you want to drive traffic to a page hosting your video.

Finally, with so many positive reasons to start a video-based email marketing campaign, you should plan one as soon as possible and always remember that you can be creative and use videos in the form of interactive explainer videos or a normal point and shoot video to promote something in an email newsletter.

Also Read: What Is Email Marketing? How To Do Email Marketing In 2020? Complete Guide!