Vidyard Presents:

VIDEO CONTENT MARKETINGBEST PRACTICE

#2Add Video to Email Campaigns

Your video’s play button is irresistible, but why limit the play button’s power to landing pages or blog posts? Email marketing is still one of the most popular channels for com-municating with prospects, and if you’re not including video, you’re missing out. Even adding the word ‘Video’ to your subject line can increase your email open rates from 7 to 13%!

As an added bonus, if your prospect for-wards your email to someone else, your video just keeps on rollin’. To top it all off? Video is trackable, and the analytics are actionable.

Take your emails from ‘delete’ to complete! Here’s some tips for including video in your emails:

While email clients like Gmail and Outlook have come a long way over the past few years, embedding a video directly into your email is still hit-or-miss. To make sure your video is optimized for every email client,we recommend taking a screenshot of your video’s thumbnail image, and linking this image to your site where the video is embedded. This has two benefits:

Add Video to Email Campaigns

Put Video Front Row Center with a Screenshot

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Most browsers - including Google Apps - load images by default now, meaning your video has a much higher chance of being seen and clicked.

Having your video on a landing pagerather than directly embedding it in your email means you can include other resources on the landing page, or build in contact forms to collect more data from viewers. Your goal is to move people from the inbox to your video page where they’ll consume more and more of your brand’s content.

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Content is King, but Cont�t is Killer

Split Test Your Video’s Splash Screen Image

A Moving Picture is Worth a Million Words (Get a GIF in there!)

Video in email is great but don’t underesti-mate the importance of context. Your videos should always be connected to the content in the email. Which begs the question, what kind of videos are effective here? You can include videos in your nurture emails if they provide leads with more information on topics you know they’ve looked into (topics you’ll know about if you’re tracking leads’ digital behaviour in your marketing automa-tion platform). Beyond helpful how-to’s and high-level intro videos, you can get specific too. If you’re heading to a conference, record a video of your team talking about what attendees can expect from your booth or speaking session. Launching a new product? Record a short demo video designed to entice email readers into checking out more information.

Video is a great addition to your emails, but it only works if it’s relevant. Take an inventory of your video collection and map useful videos to upcoming email campaigns.

Instead of a static image representing your video content, you can stand out even further if you use an animated GIF.

GIFs are supported across almost all email clients except for Outlook 2007-2010; none-theless, Outlook will show the first frame of the GIF, so all is not lost if you chose to use one. (Just make sure the first frame of the GIF is something you want featured in your email for Outlook folks.)

Because the still image is what you’re hoping to get clicks with, one of the most effective things you can do to increase engagement is to split test your video splash screens and find the still image that tests well with your audience. You could use your email market-ing software’s split tests to deliver two ver-sions of your email with different splash screens to find out which one gets a higher click through rate, or you can split test witha feature in a video marketing platform.

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See for YourselfVideo is an excellent addition to your email campaigns and can double your click through rate, but don’t take our word for it. Start using video (and the word ‘video’) in your subject lines and see what kind of magic you can conjure up!