Using videos in email marketing
Videos in Email Marketing? Stats Prove the Future is Now Here
It’s no longer black and white, it’s no longer information for us to read and/or respond to, it’s no longer just a colourful even ratio of text to images expertly embedded. Now the reader of the email, has become the viewer.
Videos. The next stage in the Email Marketing Evolution.
The true way of gaining those extra customers, increasing the click-through rates, and keeping your clients engaged is by utilising videos. I have been working in email marketing for years, and we have been told that we need to avoid videos like we need to avoid gifs, Times New Roman and the word ‘FREE’ in the subject line. However, now we do not see it as a complication, or something that is just considered flashy, and it CAN be fully functional.
Read? Meh. Watch? Yeh.
In the current generation, we tend to have a smaller attention span, and if you are still reading this, you are proving me wrong…or you are too old. Jokes aside, we absorb videos on a daily basis from all different types of angles. YouTube is not only becoming a hobby for everyone, but also the dream job for young children here in the UK and USA. On Social Media, chatting to old friends, joining groups and playing games are a thing of the past, but watching random videos you have been tagged in, is now the norm. We don’t update statuses any more, we show our ‘stories’ which are live videos. Professional websites include videos to illustrate what their company is all about, whilst many have YouTube channels to reveal more content to the public, and let’s not forget we are bombarded with video advertisements everywhere we surf. It was only a matter of time before the emails we check constantly would include more footage and less text.
The Statistics to Back it Up
Six of the best stats to encourage you to start thinking of engineering videos into your email content.
- Using video in emails can lead to a 300% increase in click-through rates (Wistia)
- 54% of consumers want to see more videos, with it being their favourite type of content (Hubspot)
- 73% of people are directly influenced when making a purchase decision after watching a video online (Oberlo)
- Putting the word ‘video’ in your subject line can increase open-rates by 19% (Biteable)
- You can be part of the 88% of marketers that are happy with their ROI on using videos in email marketing (Animoto)
- Sticking with that number again, 88% of people spend more time on a website with a video on it (Forbes)
How to Use Videos?
There are two different methods to incorporate videos into your emails and they are;
- Embedding the email using HTML5
- Using a screenshot of the video
Option one will display the video in the email, and will be ready for you to click play and watch within your email client. Whereas the second option will just give you a screenshot of the video with the play sign. Clicking on the image, will then direct you to the video’s URL which will open up the video with it automatically set to play. Whilst the first option may sound like it provides a better user experience, it must be noted that the majority of email clients don’t support it, and it will instead show a fallback. All those hours of coding can seem a bit of a waste. The second option doesn’t require the coding, it enables you to track the persons clicks on the video and you avoid any type of formatting issue (as embedded videos can look atrocious on mobiles). Therefore, it may be the wiser choice to go for the latter, as there is little to no research on suggesting that readers are inclined not open up the video from clicking on the screenshot image, meaning the user experience isn’t negatively impacted.
Those are the ONLY two ways of using videos in your email, so don’t ever be tempted to attach a video as this will almost certainly be blocked by spam filters. An email with a small copy, an intriguing subject line, and an informative or entertaining video can work wonders for you marketing needs, so try to perfect it, before you are playing catch-up.
Thank you for reading the article, but how much better would it have been had we explained all of this in a video, eh?
Oh, we should probably mention that if you’re organising an event we offer email marketing that is powered by your event registration data.
