Videos are a significant tool for any company’s marketing plans.
They grab the attention of viewers and keep them interested in what you have to say. So it follows that using video in your emails is likely to make greater impact on your audience.
Marketers using video in their email campaigns are seeing revenues jump by up to 40% and according to a study by Invodo, using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19% and click through rates by 65%.
Ryan Spanger, founder of DreamEngine and host of The Web Video Marketing Show, says “The most effective tool for marketing our videos is personal emails containing the video and a short explanation about why watching the video will be valuable.”
But how do you get video into your emails?
Most video files are going to be too large to send as an attachment and many corporate firewalls will block attachments regardless of size.
You may have heard that you can embed videos directly into an email using HTML5 coding, but the only email client that currently supports HTML5 is Apple Mail. This means that the only people on your list that will be able to see or watch your embedded video are those who are using Apple Mail.
You could just use a text link to the video in your email, but a text link might not get noticed when people open your email.
So, the best solution to including videos in your emails is to insert a thumbnail image into your email and link that image to a landing page on your website where the video is embedded.
Overlay a play icon on your video thumbnail so that it looks like a video player, and include a short description of the video in your email to give people a reason why they should click to watch your video.
To draw even more attention to your thumbnail image, you can add some simple animation using GIFs. Showing a few frames of your video on loop or adding animation to the play icon (like we have done on the video to the left) has been successfully used in emails to increase customer engagement and click throughs.
Set your video to autoplay when the page loads so your viewer doesn’t have to click twice to watch your video.
Finally, make sure that you place a call to action at the end of your video. Including video on a landing page can increase your conversion rates by up to 80%, so you want to give your viewers a clear next step to take after watching your videos.
If you are embedding your videos from YouTube, be sure to check out our previous blog posts about How to disable related video thumbnails from popping up at the end of your videos and How to add an end screen to your YouTube videos.
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