How to Add Video to Your Email Marketing Strategy

If you want to improve email open rates, engagement, and conversions, it may be time to consider video email marketing. Emails can pair with your videos just as naturally as peanut butter and jelly or if you’re in the south, biscuits and gravy. Of course, you can emails to help increase the number of viewers that your video gets. In turn, videos can help improve your open and conversion rates.

Ways to Add Video in Email

If you’re already convinced that it’s time to begin sending video in email, you might benefit from some suggestions about how to incorporate that into your overall email strategy and of course, how to actually send emails inside of videos.

Consider a brief discussion of both of these topics:

Since videos lead to better open rates and conversions, it’s only prudent to consider incorporating them into several different parts of your marketing strategy:

• Test out email subject headers that use the word video and of course, include the video link inside of your message.
• Post videos on social networks or your blog, and then use your email list to promote that content.
• Create a monthly video newsletter that highlights certain products, provides helpful solutions to your audience, or helps to introduce people in your company.
• Use valuable informational or how-to videos as a bonus to get people to signup for your email list or membership site.

Simple Ways to Add Video to Emails

If you want to please all members of your audience, you can’t directly embed videos inside of your email. The problem isn’t that it’s impossible. You can embed videos with HTML5; however, many email clients won’t interpret the embed code, so you probably won’t actually deliver the video to a lot of your viewers. That will just waste your efforts and disappoint your subscribers.

The most common way to insert a video into an email is to create an image that looks like a video. When your viewers click the arrow on your graphic, an image link will taken them to the page where the actual image has been stored. If you do this, make sure you optimize your imagine for mobile phones and tablets.

You may not have to do all of this work yourself. Some popular email services already provide you with handy features that can help you master video email marketing quickly:

• MailChimp: MailChimp already provides users with a couple of different ways to include videos that are hosted on well-known hosting sites like Vimeo and YouTube. The methods will even create a thumbnail graphic to use inside of your content, but both methods will open the video in a new window after the user clicks. You can learn more about how to include a video in email with MailChimp here.
• Constant Contact and AWeber: These services both suggest linked an image of a video to an actual hosted video. You can find a video to help you do this with Constant Contact. This article explains how to add videos to email with AWeber.
• Infusionsoft: If you use Infusionsoft, you might also be interested in their instructions for sending YouTube videos via email.

If you’d prefer to keep your viewers inside of your email message, you might consider creating an animated .GIF file that looks like a short video. You won’t be able to include audio, however this format is very standard and should start playing as soon as the user opens the message. Of course, you should optimize this file to work well on mobile phones and tablets. If you decide to use an animated graphic, you might create a very short and punchy teaser that will encourage your audience to click through to a longer video that you have hosted on your own website or a popular hosting service.

You Can Use Video Email Marketing for Many Aspects of Your Marketing Plan

Most marketers think of creating video marketing emails that they can use to increase sales and revenue. Certainly, you can use videos inside of emails as sales tools. However, you can also use videos to help with some common aspects of customer service, highlight worthy causes that your company is involved in, and to educate your subscribers about ways to use your product after they have purchased it. If you do this, your email video marketing can help increase sales, brand loyalty, and customer satisfaction.

flexoffers