Are You Using Video in Your Emails?

Plain text emails have their place, and are less likely to be marked as spam, which is important if you are emailing someone for the first time. But once you have established contact with someone and they have whitelisted your email address, you can mix it up a little bit with your emails. Video is hot right now in email marketing.

Some email providers, specifically Gmail and Outlook, don’t allow videos to play within the email itself, particularly Gmail and Yahoo. You also won’t be able to view the video directly in Outlook, if you use that to view your emails. So, you need to keep this in mind, if you are sending videos in your emails, as part of one of your email campaigns.

Video is the perfect format to capture the client attention and communicate, it lets you get your message out there to your subscribers in a short time, and it’s a format that the viewers enjoy and results can be measured with metrics.

Related Articles: Best Ways to Attract and Hold Online Users’ Attention

Make sure you think about your subscribers who are not able to view videos right from their email. You have to make it easy for them to see the video, not a hassle, which will frustrate people and they won’t ever see your video. A way to get around this, is to use animated GIFs. These are moving pictures, usually just a couple of seconds. But that movement is what catches your viewer’s eye. Include a link to a landing page that has the video on auto play. That way, with just one click, your subscribers and customers can view the video you sent them in the email. Normally, I would not recommend having a video on auto play on your website, because it’s pushy and intrusive. In this case though, the viewer clicked on the picture or GIF to watch a video, so they are expecting a video to play when they click it.

You can embed video now in emails with HTML5, rather than clicking through from your email to play it, but this hasn’t been enabled across all email clients. Email clients that support integrated video include iOS devices, Apple Mail, and Outlook.com.
Just to play it safe, to make sure that all of the people you are sending your emails out to, are able to view the videos the same, use the GIF method. Linking to a video on your website rather than playing it in an email allows the content to live on as a more permanent resource. This is great for SEO, you want people sharing and linking to the content on your domain.

Some interesting facts about using video in your email campaign:

• Over fifty percent of marketers all over the world say that video is the type of content that they have found to have the best ROI.
• Ninety three percent of marketers use video for online marketing, sales or communication.
• Just by adding the word Video in an email subject line boosts open rates 19%, click-through rates by 65% and drops unsubscribe rates by 26%.
• Videos have been found effective by marketers for brand awareness, lead generation and online engagement.

Ultimately the goal from a marketing perspective is to get people back to your website where they can turn into customers. Video in an email campaign is a great way to drive traffic back to your website.

Source: Digitalmarketingenie