Video has plenty of room to grow in email marketing. After all, if you could boost your open rate, click-through rate, and reduce your unsubscribe rate, just by adding one thing to an email campaign, wouldn’t you?
Here’s how video can help you grow your email list, improve campaign performance, and, ultimately, drive traffic to your website.
1. Produce More Video Content
You won’t be able to do much with your email marketing campaigns if you don’t have some great video content to work with. Quality video is no longer very expensive or time-consuming to make, as long as you are willing to get a little creative. For instance, you can create a lot of video using just a laptop.
First and foremost, capture your content whenever you can. Record those webinars, conferences, presentations, and any other instance where you are generating sound bites or visual content. This is easy to do with screen capture tools like ScreenFlow, or QuickTime. Most online presentation software, like GoToMeeting, offer recording and exporting features.
You can splice and dice those snippets with other images and content using a free movie editor, and quickly publish to the web. Some great basic options include iMovie or even video editing apps on your phone.
Another alternative is to make short animated videos with PowToon or Vyond. Their templates make storyboarding and editing as easy as PowerPoint.
Animoto is a great option for those who have plenty of images (and maybe a few short videos). Their platform automatically creates a video based on your images and a template you select. This makes it particularly well-suited for customer testimonial videos and business advertisements.
2. Grow Your List
This technique is especially effective for content marketers, business service providers, and consultants. Embed your video on a landing page, write an interesting description with a compelling call to action, and place an email gate in front of your video content.
Using social media, paid search, and SEO, drive traffic to the landing page. Interested viewers will have to enter their email addresses to view your video.
Even better, if you add an email platform integration to your SproutVideo account, you can send all signups straight to the list of your choice.
3. Engage Subscribers
Depending on the platform you choose, you can even create drip email campaigns to target your subscribers based on their viewing activity. When possible, SproutVideo will send information about how much of a video a viewer watched to your integrated marketing platform.
This information tells you who your most interested and engaged viewers are. You can then use this data to send targeted offers, upsells, or calendar invites to these high value leads.
4. Boost Click-Through Rates
Adding video to email campaigns has been shown to boost click-through rates. It can even improve open rates if the video is mentioned in the subject line.
However, most email clients do not support video playback in the inbox using 3rd party plugins. So what do you do?
Use our email embed code to quickly and easily embed an image of your video poster frame, including the play button, and link it to your video landing page. This is the quickest and easiest way to encourage readers to click through and view your video.
Some ESPs, like MailChimp and Constant Contact, have a video tag that automatically creates the linked thumbnail for you. Or, use a GIF generator to convert your video into an animated image, which will work in most inboxes, and again, link to the landing page.
There are other options, however. BombBomb and a couple other innovative ESPs enable video playback in the inbox. Most work by swapping the video for an animated GIF or static image according to the recipient’s inbox settings to ensure optimal delivery of your content. This type of real-time adjustment is only going to become more common as video in email campaigns becomes more popular.
If you’re ready to see how SproutVideo’s platform can help your email campaigns with our video marketing tools, signup for a free 30 day trial today.
