Nowadays, video content has become an essential part of any marketing strategy. As audiences tend to willingly consume short clips and videos, it’s not surprising that 92% of marketers currently use video content to engage viewers and reach their target audience. The rapid growth in popularity of social media has led to a growing amount of video content online.
Due to the pandemic, live streams have become the new go-to means of communication; that’s why 57% of marketers now use live videos on Facebook and Instagram in their video marketing strategies.
As videos effectively increase click-through rates (CTR), marketers try to embed them in any way possible. Email marketing is no exception.
How Can You Use Video Email Marketing in a Branding Campaign
Video email marketing means including videos in your newsletters and other emails. You can analyze engagement levels by keeping an eye on the likes, shares, views, and comments your videos receive. As videos get more attention, they often rank higher in search engine results than in plain text. This means that videos enable you to better promote your products and services, drive traffic to your website, increase social media engagement, and more.
What Kind of Emails Can You Embed Videos in?
There are many types of emails you can embed videos in, from newsletters to educational emails. Videos might help you announce a new release, show a tutorial featuring your company’s products, talk about discounts, promote events, and more. You don’t have to include videos in every email; the main goal is to increase conversions.
Here are examples of emails you can embed videos in:
- ‘Meet the brand’ emails
- Newsletters
- Customer nurturing emails
- Educational emails
- New product announcements
- Event announcements
A recent study showed that the more personalized your video, the better. Use data, analytics, and questionnaires to understand what your customers are interested in and what makes them subscribe or unsubscribe.
5 Video Email Marketing Tips
Choose the videos you want to embed
Given the many types of emails you can choose from for your video campaign, you need to decide what content to show. This, in turn, will dictate what types of videos to make to increase CTR and get the most return on your investment (ROI) from your marketing strategy. The types of emails for video embedding listed above will help you to focus on your choice.
It’s important not to bring all these videos together in a single email or multiple newsletters in a row, as this will only confuse viewers. There’s no need even to use videos in every email. Start with one video in a single email and analyze the traffic and recipient activity. If the CTR is high and the audience is interested, you can confidently develop a campaign with these videos, or add the other types.
Don’t forget to take a screenshot to use as a video thumbnail in the message.
Make sure you can share your video
Avoid those awkward situations when your email recipients cannot open the video file. When it comes to email newsletters, you can’t just insert a link, upload a video, or stream it from YouTube. You have to upload it as a file. To do that, you need to host your video in your company’s services or via your content distribution network (CDN). Remember to take into account the cost of hosting and streaming from different services!
Consider, too, how to add large files to your email. For example, Gmail lets you share files up to 25 MB in size, so you must be careful with HD videos. Sending them without errors may require the use of a special converter to change the file size.
Another good tip is to include a few words about your video. Give the audience a short overview to introduce the clip and list the main points. This will save the day if problems with the network occur or your client’s device doesn’t download images automatically. Even if the video doesn’t show up, you can still deliver your message.
Don’t forget your current customers
It’s one thing to talk about how to get new clients, but what about the old ones? As they’ve made a purchase once, they need less convincing to trust your brand, so it’s easier to encourage them to buy more from you. Because they’ve already invested in your brand, they are more likely to subscribe to a newsletter or follow you on social networks and continue watching your videos. It’s a great opportunity to increase revenues coming from existing customers.
Sometimes the road to getting customers to rebuy can be long and hard. You can use analytics to understand their interests and get them on board again with more engaging content. It might be introducing a new product, a tutorial, or a clip about the type of products your customer is interested in.
Add a personal touch
Any communication becomes more valuable when you make it personal. If you have a limited number of clients, you can make personalized videos and add company names, watermarks, or CEO names. With personalization, you can create a tight connection between your brand and those who are ready to invest in it.
But personalization is not just about building community with the assistance of an email marketing strategy. It helps to use analytics tools, too. For example, pay attention to those who don’t watch your videos to the end and explore what made them do this. Some tools let you send a reminder to recipients to finish watching the video; analytics lets you go a stage further by enabling you to change your business processes and monitor progress. As for recipients, these techniques make them feel special and important to your company. All in all, it means not only a better relationship with your users but also more views and more clicks.
Here is a list of the best programs that let you quickly edit your videos. Some of the web services listed are free, while other software requires a paid subscription:
Include video captions
A not-so-obvious but important tip. Make sure your video content is accessible to the deaf and hearing impaired. When thinking about how to put subtitles in your video, remember about video-editing software. You can easily attach subtitles via YouTube Studio or use a video editor or converter to upload titles right from within the program. Another reason you need captions is that it’s not always possible to watch videos with the sound on, for example, at the office or on public transport. Subtitles will help you to deliver the message even if the sound is turned off.