Despite its successes, email has a reputation for being decidedly old-school. In a highly competitive marketing environment dominated by social media, the question is often asked, ‘Is there still scope for email marketing’?
The answer is a clear ‘Yes.’ Email marketing remains one of the key techniques in a marketer’s tool kit. It still generates a high ROI, provided you execute your campaigns effectively.
Now, email marketing is embracing video. No other communication medium cuts through as decisively as video. So, adopting video for your email marketing is a smart move if you are looking to lift your brand awareness, increase customer conversions, or educate existing customers about your product or services.
5 Key Video Email Marketing Benefits
Video emails are clear differentiators. They stand out from the mass of emails received by viewers every day. They combine several distinguishing advantages:
- Hooks: Your audience and turbo-charges engagement with them
- Grabs Attention: Videos arrest viewer attention. Viewers consistently rate find them as more engaging than plain text, making video more impactful
- Time Effective: Video enriched emails saves both receivers and senders time. It communicates product or service information faster, making complex topics more easily understood
- Greater Reach: Videos can quickly go viral. Viewers tend to be more responsive to a service or product after viewing its video
- SEO Ranking Boost: Online video draws more attention, leading to more sharing across social media and thus boosting your brand’s SEO ranking.
Just Do It!
Some best practices to consider as you start including video in your email marketing are:
1. Campaign Planning
Set clear objectives for your video content. Outline clear marketing strategies, do your due diligence on your audience and your competitors and identify your core audience constituency.
2. Shoot Arresting Videos
Use solid quality video recording gear if you want professional results. Opt for DSLR, renowned for its quality optics, excellent image quality and manual controls.
3. Keep It Brief
Lengthy videos often fail to translate into audience engaged. If your video extends longer than three minutes or is mostly a static voiceover, your audience will drift off. Large video files also require way too much time to attach. Short and intriguing is the way to go. Aim for a duration time of between one and two minutes.
4. Sharing Drives Market Impact
Lift your video’s visibility and encourage sharing by hosting your video on popular video-sharing platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo. These free platforms are great at brand building, helping you drive website traffic and generating leads.
A great source of the authentic content sought by viewers is your brand’s Betacam and Broadcast tapes. Convert them using a Betacam SP to digital or Broadcast to digital service for the best results.
5. Test, Test, Test
Always test your video before you release it. Remember different distribution channels have varying audience preferences so tweak your video content to reflect these audience dynamics.
6. Trial Including “Video” In Your Subject Line
Experiment with dropping “video” into your subject line. Some recipients will find your video email more attractive if they know it has video content embedded, leading to more recipients clicking on it. Once they do, your job is half completed already.
7. Always Include A Call To Action (CTA)
Your CTA is a critical element in video email campaigns. Encourage your viewers to share your video across their social media channels with their peers or friends and to take action after viewing.
To avoid diluting your message, keep your CTA clear, actionable and immediate. Position your CTA in your first paragraph. Alternatively, drop it in at the end of your video.
Say ‘No’ To Autoplay
Many of your viewers find autoplay the world’s most annoying function. Playing your video automatically risks alienating them before they’ve even viewed your message. Give them their space and the freedom to click on it themselves if they so choose.
The Virtues Of HTML5
HTML5 is the newest, most popular language used to embed videos in emails. The format offers viewers the significant benefit of a vibrant media experience.
Moreover, Outlook, iPhone Mail, iPad Mail and Apple Mail 4 through to 6 all support HTML5 videos. Around 77 per cent of websites now use HTML5 according to a recent study.
Animated .PNG and .GIF Videos
Animated .PNG and .GIF videos use open standards such as HTML5. .PNG is delivers improved clarity, transparency and depth of colour. These enjoy a more compact file size in contrast to .GIFs. .PNG images also enable short text descriptions, useful for helping search engines look for images. Animated .PNGs also support 8-bit transparency and 24-bit images unlike the .GIFs format.
.GIFs are useful for images employing a limited palette of colours, simple graphics and text images such as logos. .GIFs usually are limited to 256 colours. However, .GIFs does support animation, making it useful for video email design. .GIF files can be also compressed into smaller file sizes.
Neither format support sound, but videos drive higher click rates in comparison to passive images.
Benefits of Adopting .PNG. And GIF Videos
- Adds value to your brand’s video creating a more viewer-friendly message
- Supports your visual message with a subject line and text in your email
- Doesn’t need video encoding language or HTML coding language
- .PNG delivers where transparency is required
- .GIF supports animated effects making it useful for icons, simple logos, clip art and flat graphics.
Video Email Marketing Practices To Avoid
- Avoid using UPPERCASE in your email content
- Never include “Click here” phrases
- Try not to use dazzling colours such as cherry-red or sky blue
- Avoid reducing the text in your HTML email. Images are unable to be read by spam filters so your emails can be flagged as spam if they are too short
- Never send your HTML email to several recipients in the one organisation. It will be flagged as spam by the email firewall
Final Observation
These days, the marketing community is buzzing about the rapid shift towards video email marketing. Like marketers, viewers are paying video a lot of attention. To improve your video email marketing performance, analyse your online analytics and look at viewer engagement behaviour to gauge the impact of your video email content. When it comes to authentic video content, there’s no better source footage than Broadcast to digital or Betacam SP to digital conversion service.
