When to Use Videos in an Email Marketing Campaign

Why use videos in email marketing?

Using videos in email marketing brings a host of advantages to the table. In addition to helping you boost your existing audience’s engagement, the approach may increase your chances to create new business leads. Besides strengthening your brand profile, the practice can also improve your return on investment (ROI).

Whether you are sharing a personalized video message to thank your customers for their business or sending a screen recording to showcase your new product interface, the right video can enrich any core message with its visuals. This assists your existing and potential customers in consuming detailed information, while also taking very little time from their busy schedules.

Due to these reasons, using videos in email campaigns has become a sought after practice by marketers and businesses across a variety of industries. As long as you are mindful of best practices for sharing videos within your emails, you can reap all of these rewards without any trouble.

The benefits of using videos in emails

In order to make an informed decision about adding video files to your emails, you can take a look at the most common benefits of using videos as a part of your email marketing plans.

Build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy

Apart from email marketing that is known for retaining customers and engaging audiences, videos are crucial for building a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. By combining both avenues, you can build an ideal marketing path for your brand. This contributes to improving the efficacy of your email campaigns.

Increase engagement with audiences

When it comes to emails, some recipients may feel overwhelmed by big blocks of text. Since videos do all the work for their viewers, recipients can feel more receptive to clicking through and consuming content. This increases your overall engagement with your audiences.

Improve your brand’s positioning

Besides being interesting in their information delivery, videos also incorporate a variety of powerful branding tools, from visual effects to sonic branding. This improves your brand positioning to your audiences and paves the way to creating stronger connections with them.

Enhance the effectiveness of your email campaigns

Videos offer a more immersive experience than text, which makes them a great tool to grab the attention of hard-to-please audiences. By using the right email templates, layouts, and design strategies, you can appeal to several audience segments at once. This enhances the overall success of your email campaigns.

Retain your existing customers

Driving traffic to videos that include business updates, future plans, and product showcases can go a long way towards engaging your existing audience. This not only helps with audience retention, but also allows you to improve customer loyalty over time. In turn, email marketing becomes a sturdy bridge between your customers and your brand.

Generate new leads

Whether you are trying to scale your business by touching base with previous customers or expand your horizons by onboarding new buyers, you need to give them good reasons to consider your pitch. Through the use of videos that shed a light on your current value proposition, you can get the most out of your sales and welcome email efforts.

When to use videos in emails

Now that you understand why you should be sharing videos through your email marketing campaigns, it is time to learn how to use them for maximum benefit. This helps you steer clear of any adverse effects, while also potentially contributing to an increase in your ROI.

Announce product updates

One of the best ways to use video in email marketing is the announcement of product updates. While this approach works for all audiences, it is especially beneficial for email campaigns that are targeted at existing and past customers who have a history of doing business with your brand.

Existing customers hold a vested interest in learning where your venture stands with their support, and past customers may be curious to know if anything has changed since their last interaction with you. In turn, there’s a high chance that both segments may watch a video that answers their questions.

In order to maintain this interest with your audience, make it a point to keep your videos concise. When you deliver the required message without a lengthy commitment of the viewer’s time, it increases the chances of email recipients watching the full video. This helps get your whole point across with relevant visuals, audio, and branding.

If you segment your audience for specific campaigns, utilizing this approach for your emails becomes a walk in the park. Since segmented campaigns present a 49% higher click-through rate (CTR) than unsegmented campaigns, this also contributes to your ROI.

Exhibit company culture

Over the past couple of years, it has become clear that customers care about the ethics of a business just as much as employees do, if not more. Those businesses that seem to care for their customers and employees positively stand apart from those that turn a blind eye to these aspects.

If a company goes a step beyond and commits to play its part within social issues, its efforts for ensuring diversity, offering equal opportunity, and addressing climate change appeal to customers as well. This gives you an excellent chance to connect with your customers by simply defining your values.

When you highlight your business’s values through video content, your emails can strike a chord with your audience. No matter if you are explaining your stance on the gender pay gap or flexible work environments, visually highlighting your company culture could go a long way towards elevating your profile to existing and new audiences alike.

This customer-facing content also holds its own on holidays such as Veterans Day as well as special occasions such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. By showcasing your business’ support for different groups throughout the year, you can continue reaping the rewards of using videos in email campaigns.

Share engaging content

When it comes to creating video messages that garner the audience’s interest, there are a world of opportunities in front of you. From making informative clips that highlight organizational values to producing entertaining videos that chronicle product development, you have various approaches at hand to make your selection.

You can also use a variety of methods to produce these videos. These options include but are not limited to visual effects, animation, and drone photography. These techniques can improve the impact of your messaging and give your audiences cogent reasons to interact with your promotional content.

In order to create compelling video marketing content, you can work with a video production team. These experts can help you produce videos that are technically sound, visually appealing, and emotionally effective.

From there, you can design visually compelling emails that drive traffic to your videos and encourage your audiences to interact with the content that you are offering to them.

These strategies for creating and disseminating content elevate the benefits of sharing videos through emails. This also delivers the intended effects of enhanced CTR and ROI.

How to embed videos in emails

Because most email clients don't support embedded video, Mailchimp’s Video content block provides a better alternative. Rather than embed a video, this content block automatically pulls a thumbnail, or preview image, from the video and links it to the video's URL. That way, recipients can click the thumbnail to view the video in a separate browser window.

You can also use Mailchimp’s Auto-Convert feature, link an image, or use merge tags to share a thumbnail image of the video that links to the video's URL. Each option is easy to use and will promote engagement with your video content.

To insert a Video content block into your campaign layout, follow these steps.

• Upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo.
• Choose an automatic thumbnail that will also show up within your email.
• Enable sharing options that make the video publicly available.
• Create your email layout with text, images, and usual branding.
• Click and drag the Video content block into your layout.
• On the Content tab of the editing pane, add your caption text and the video URL, making sure to include http:// or https://.
• After you enter the URL, Mailchimp will automatically pull in the video or thumbnail.
• Edit the style and settings as needed.
• Click Save & Close.

Video email best practices

In order to maximize the possible benefits from your efforts, you should also follow best practices for sending videos in email campaigns.

Pay attention to your subject line

When sending a video email, your subject line should highlight the immediate benefit as well as the content of the video. For instance, if you are introducing a new product, your subject line should outline how recipients can quickly get to know the new offering.

If you want some assistance during this process, you can use a tool that helps you write engaging subject lines. Even if you have confidence in your creative abilities, this can provide you with data-driven insights that help you optimize your email for maximum interaction.

Segment your emails

You can boost the effects of your video messaging by creating personalized emails that are sent to specific recipient groups. When your videos reach their target audience, you can get the attention you want and build the reputation of your brand.

For instance, when trying to retain customers, you can create a video thanking your existing customers for their support. From there, you can send it only to individuals and entities who are still with your business as paying customers. This can help your CTR and overall engagement alike.

Create high-quality videos

When you are sharing videos through email campaigns, it is easy to find options that cut corners on production costs. But when you take this route, you risk compromising the quality of your video and email content—and hurting your reputation, too.

Being mindful of these factors, make it a point to invest in your video production. Regardless of the type of video that you are creating, you should consider hiring professionals for its creation. This helps you deliver quality content to your audience through every email.

Final notes

Creating videos for your email marketing campaigns can be a highly beneficial way to elevate your brand, connect with your audience, and expand your outreach. By keeping essential points in mind, you can get the most out of this marketing strategy.

With Mailchimp’s all-in-one email marketing platform, you can benefit from purpose-built tools and intelligent features to take your email marketing campaigns to the next level. Whether you want to connect with existing customers or reach out to new audiences, our solutions can help you achieve your goals without breaking the bank.