Why You Need to Start Including Videos in Your Email Marketing Campaigns?

Over the last decade, email has been one of the most effective and reliable marketing approaches to reach out and engage with prospects and customers. An Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report has concluded that around 61% of customers wish businesses to reach and communicate with them via email marketing campaigns. Many marketing experts recommend including video content in email marketing campaigns as videos serve powerful means of boosting email list and customer engagement. 

Let’s face it, we all love videos and our inboxes get mostly inundated with unwanted marketing communications. At that, video content gives better prominence to email messages that can clearly stand out from the rest of the messages. If subscribers get informed that the email message includes video content, they feel more likely to open the email and engage with the messages than emails with other visual and textual content.

Why adding videos in email? 

Simply because sending video along with textual and other visual content in the email copy to entice audience in grasping information in a more easily consumable and shareable format. Video inclusion in email has benefited marketers to stay more engaged with their audience who are interested in receiving video solutions and content, thus helping them to grow the email list in leaps and bounds since subscribers are more interested to click the form submission buttons and share their email addresses when they know they can play a video in contrast to textual content.

So, how to use video content that it can significantly increase email opens before even viewing the video content? Here are few tried, tested and effective techniques to include video in email for maximizing open rates and overall campaign performance.  

Video Email: Subject Line

Subscribers prefer email subject lines that are precise, pertinent, crisp and will also include easy to grasp snackable information. Hence, it is best to provide subscribers with the email that perfectly fits to this requirement and also informing them that the email contains a video.  Contacts would love to watch a video of 60-seconds than having to read the entire email copy, even though it is a best written copy. The inclusion of the term “video” in email subject line has potential to multiply open rates as much as 7% to 13%. So, the email subject line must attract your audience’s attention even in the midst of an overcrowded inbox. Most interested subscribers are also known to push bulk of email messages to the spam box to find the messages that interest them the most. We recommend writing the title of the video in the email subject line in order to better able to sell the email content without hesitating to brag about that your email has a video inside. Marketers can use all caps within parenthesis or use bold font style to convey the message such as:

“Check out how to make Christmas dinner in just one hour [VIDEO]”

“Play this VIDEO to turn your landing page into a lead generation machine” 

Turn email more interactive with HTML5

Embedding video directly in an email is not the only way to share video in email. Several email service providers may not support technicalities of play video within an email, even though marketing technologies are advancing to embed videos in email messages. A great way of including videos in email is to embed the video within the html code of the email and in this regard, HTML5 is the best bet. Though HTML5 is known to be the most updated version, but some email services might not feature support of HTML5. 

If you are using HTML5 to add video in email, your marketing team needs one dedicated person who is familiar and expert in coding. You can find an instance of HTML5 video include code here:

<video width=”650″ height=”460″ poster=”http://mnpsite.com/uploads/winbackemail.jpg” controls=”controls”>

<source src=”http:// mnpsite.com/videotitle.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″ />

<a href=”http:// mnpsite.com/”><img src=”http:// mnpsite.com/uploads/winbackemail.jpg” width=”650″ height=”460″ /></a> </video>

This code will help marketers set the width and height parameters for including the video and instructs the email the image it will flash as well as provide a link to the main video source. 

Remember that if the formatting will be off or even worse, the link is broken, the email message will end up appearing disorderly and unprofessional. Moreover, if email reaches to contacts whose internet connection is slow or intermittent, or the email client has disabled images by default, the embedded video will not appear. Though certain email servers may not support HTML5 video embedding then, try a different video inclusion tactic which will work for your subscribers.

Send videos with a thumbnail in emails 

This is a far easier and effective technique which fortunately works for all types of email clients. And the trick is to use a still image which is linked to the video Instead of embedding the actual video. Though the video will not start playing within the email itself, but the email can be linked to a landing page or the targeted webpage or video uploading channel without requiring to take the heavy task of HTML embedding. Check out how to do this:  

• First, create the thumbnail image which will also include a play button like it appears in the actual video and various formats that can be used for this thumbnail can range from jpg, Jpeg, png etc.
• Next, you need to hyperlink the image with the URL of the webpage or the link of the video posted in a YouTube channel.

And, that’s all! As soon as your subscribers will click the “play” button on the image, they will be redirected to the intended webpage, landing page or YouTube page wherein they can instantly play the video. This is considered to be more effective, failsafe and flawless technique of adding videos into email messages and getting more people to actually watch the video. Marketers can simply get a vector images of play button and add that on the video thumbnail image. 

Animated video GIFs are also an amazing way to let subscribers preview the video without requiring to embed the actual video in an email, especially in those product demo emails. This method will give a small preview of what the video is about and sneak-peek of  features and benefits.