If you use email marketing, you already know it is a highly effective marketing tool. With an ROI of $42 for every dollar spent, email is a great way to connect to your customers and prospects and stay on top of every sales opportunity.

However, one thing you may not have tried yet is email marketing video, which combines the power of video marketing, which tends to be highly engaging, with email, a very cost-effective channel.

If you're unsure whether this strategy would suit your business or not, we've prepared this article to answer a few questions you might have about video and email marketing. 📧

So, let's begin by explaining why you should invest in video.

According to Forbes, 90% of customers say they're more likely to make a purchase after watching a video. Furthermore, customers indicate that videos tend to help them make decisions when it comes to buying a product.

Also, if you use video marketing, your revenue is likely to increase 49% faster when compared to marketers who don't use it.

To add to these stats, the same article from Forbes shows that 50% of users will check out online videos first to find out more about a product or service before even visiting a store. With the increased numbers of users in online shopping, it's likely that more users will be watching videos before they buy online too.

Video is therefore a highly effective way to inform your customers or prospects about your product and how to use it.

Since your video will influence decisions, you'll want to segment your video content too. Users want the video they're watching to show what they want to know. This means that when creating your video content, you need to take into account the stages of the sales funnels your target audience is at, so you can ensure that your video will be able to appeal to your target audience. 🎯

To figure out if video marketing is right for you, ask yourself these questions:

• What is the goal of your message? If you know exactly what you want to achieve, it becomes easier to define the type of video you should do.
• Are you ready to add video to your marketing plan? Maybe your company still needs a few steps before you can start using video. And that's perfectly fine.
• Are you aware of video marketing best practices? If not, maybe you should read a bit about the rules of the game before you can jump right into it.

Is Video Marketing Worth it?

The short answer is yes. But why is email video marketing so important? Here are a few reasons why:

• Videos can go viral, whereas that is unlikely to happen to written content.
• Video can help your SEO strategy because YouTube is the second most popular search engine used worldwide. So I would advise adding your videos to YouTube and linking to them in your email. But we'll discuss that in a minute.
• Using video gives your product a personal touch and makes your users feel closer to you. If you are explaining how to use your product, a video can make your users feel like they're interacting with a real person. A video is much more relatable than text. It's human, and people crave human interaction.
• When creating your video content, you can split up your content into bite-sized sections and send them out at intervals, thereby creating a video series that that will keep your audience interested.

Video marketing is a highly engaging tool that can help you increase sales, according to the stats mentioned above. So, it pays off to invest in email marketing video.

A Few Tips for Email Marketing Video

1. Check your Platform for Compatibility

First of all, you need to know most email clients don't support embedded video. Most of the time, if you use HTML5 to add the video to your message, all that's going to show is a boring gray rectangle saying that video is not supported.

However, there are several ways to work around that, and we'll show several on this list.

2. Use Gifs Instead of Native Video

Gifs, as we mentioned in this article about Gifs in Email Marketing, are a great way to show information about your product or a current offer. The good thing about Gifs is that most email providers support them. However, even when using a Gif, you should always put the most important information on the first frame.

Using the first frame to show the crux of your message will make sure that even if some of your recipients use email providers that do not support gifs, you will still be able to convey the main points in your email marketing message.

We also recommend setting up a landing page that matches the look and feel of the email you are sending, so it'll be easier to collect useful information or sell a specific product or service. Remember to set up a nice, easy to find CTA, so your users won't get lost.

3. Add a Play Button

This is a fairly common way to overcome the issue of videos not playing in some email clients. It's easy, really: just use a frame from your video or your video thumbnail and add a play button to it. ▶️

Then, add a link to your video in the image, so users will be able to watch your video on your favorite streaming platform just by clicking on the image. This is a seamless way to connect your video and email which does not require coding.

You can also add a CTA under your video, so there will be several places in which users can click to get to the video. I recommend setting your video to autoplay wherever you've hosted it since your recipients already clicked a play button when they got to the actual video. If you want, you can use a setting to mute the video, just like on Facebook or Twitter. Muting the video makes sense from a perspective of privacy: if the user can't listen to the content straight away, the video will stay there waiting for them to unmute it and watch it when they want.

4. Use a Video in Your Signature

Did you know you can add a video to your email signature? That's a clever way to use video and plus, it's highly engaging. The process is the same as what we have mentioned in the previous tip: just add an image to your signature with a play button and the link for the video.

This makes the interaction much more interesting for users, and it's useful especially if you're cold-emailing prospects. By adding a video of yourself, you're giving that human touch to your email. Users are more likely to respond if they identify themselves with you in some way and one of the best ways to do that is by using email marketing video.

5. Get Video Testimonials

This might seem like a difficult task, but it is truly worth it as it's a lot more effective than text reviews. Having people talking about your product on video is enticing for those who watch the videos. You can provide an incentive for users to record their testimonials, but other than that, the cost of producing those videos is minimal.

Even if you add an incentive for those testimonials, this method is still going to give you a great return on investment. You can use the video testimonials as part of an email sequence, and/or add them to your website. 🌐

6. Create a Video Email Series

If you want to tell customer success stories, but think the content might be too long to tell at once, you can create a series of videos; each of the videos telling a small story.

This will generate a great email sequence, giving you content for weeks. Plus, you'll keep your users waiting for “the next chapter”, looking forward to your emails. Users don't hate email marketing: they dislike email marketing that lacks useful content for them.

By telling a customer success story, you'll show how your product changed someone's life, implying your prospects can feel the same way if they just give your product a chance.

7. Optimize Your Video for Shares

As mentioned before, video can go viral easily. That doesn't mean that using video will make your brand viral instantaneously, but a video is a lot easier and more interesting to share and, therefore, has an increased potential to go viral.

To make this easier, use sharing buttons on your video and make your email shareable. If necessary, add an incentive as well: offer a coupon for users who share your content, a discount, anything you can offer that makes the difference for those users but that's not costly for you. Those shares increase brand awareness, especially if your video is original in some way.

8. Onboarding Videos

If you do marketing for a SaaS company, you can use videos that go through the onboarding process, making that content extremely useful for new users. Create tutorials that you can send by email as well.

You can include these videos in your email marketing and add them to your website on a dedicated page.

9. Create Tour Guides for Local Experiences

If your business is related to tourism, such as a local restaurant, a travel agency, a hotel, or anything similar, you can create videos that offer a tour guide for the city in which you're located or the travel destination that you want to promote.

These guides are both useful and entertaining, and they promote your brand even though they're not focused on your business directly. You can use them to source content for a newsletter, showcasing different activities available locally. 🏡

Wrapping Up

When it comes to email marketing videos, the possibilities are endless. These are just a few ideas that you can use to create an email marketing video campaign. Do not be afraid to showcase your creativity when it comes to video content. You can adapt any of these ideas to fit your company's business and products.

Just remember, be useful, be entertaining, and be clever. Your recipients expect the best from you, so be meticulous when building your video marketing.