There are more avenues for marketing content today than ever before — in-app, social media and SMS, to name a few. Among them, email marketing remains a tried and true strategy. But that doesn’t mean it comes without issues. Over 40% of marketers report email engagement to be their No. 1 challenge.
It comes down to content fatigue. As email marketing has grown over the past 4 decades, so has content overload. Today, an estimated 333 billion emails are sent and received each day, making it more difficult for marketers to create email campaigns that stand out. Fortunately, there’s a solution.
Rather than email your audience a blocky length of text (that they don’t want to read), try sending them a video that’s fun to watch. In this article, we’ll talk about how businesses are already doing exactly this to enhance their campaign results — and how you can leverage video yourself to increase email engagement rates.
The Issue With Traditional Email Marketing
As we touched on before, many marketers struggle to improve their email engagement rates. Failing to engage your customers can have consequences. A low email engagement rate can send your campaign to the spam folder, cause an uptick in your unsubscriber count and have a negative impact on your bottom line.
Setting time and resources aside to improve your email campaigns is worth it, though. Reports show the ROI of email marketing to be as high as $44 for every $1 spent. And over 62% of millennials feel the most personal communication channel is email — making it a critical part of any marketer’s strategy.
What’s more, almost 80% of marketers believe email is important to overall company success. So while engagement can be tricky, it’s still worthwhile to leverage email marketing.
The Value of Video
How can marketers make their email campaigns more engaging? The answer is simple. By putting their content in a video.
Video reigns supreme when it comes to consumer engagement. Statistics show the average click-through rate for video ads in mobile apps is 7.5x higher than display ads. On Facebook, posts that include videos receive the highest engagement.
There are no signs of video slowing down, either. TikTok was the most downloaded app of 2021, making it clear that short-form video is here to stay. And other social giants have taken notice, including YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.
So it’s no surprise video can also help to improve email marketing campaigns. Including a video in an email can increase CTR by 200%-300%. Over half of email subscribers report they prefer emails with videos. The bottom line? Including video in your email marketing campaign is a great solution to boosting the metrics you care about most.
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It’s easy to embed a video into an email, too — simply embed a thumbnail of the video that the user can click on to access the video landing page.
Tip: Make your thumbnail more engaging by animating it! Create a GIF, personalized to every customer, to use as a thumbnail. We’ve seen Personalized GIFs increase CTR by 5x compared to generic, static thumbnails.
Making Your Video Email Dynamic
Do you remember the early days of email? Marketers quickly realized that adding a person’s name to an email would increase the chances of the user opening it. But it only took about 10 minutes longer for spammers to copy the trend — making it commonplace and ineffective in grabbing someone’s attention.
Marketers have quickly realized that to cut through digital noise, they need to do more than just personalize the name field.
The same thing applies to the video content included in your email. If your viewer is watching a video irrelevant to their interests, it’s likely they’ll click off after only a few seconds.
Launching an email campaign with videos completely customized to every user might seem like a challenge. How can businesses with hundreds of thousands of customers create video content that resonates with every individual? Most companies have resorted to audience segmentation, but there’s a better solution.
With the right technology, you can automatically pull your customer data in and create a Personalized Video for every individual — providing them with content that’s not only fun to watch, but meaningful and relevant.
Whether you’re looking to email an exclusive offer or give a warm welcome to your company, including video is a surefire way to increase your email engagement rates. Need some inspiration? Take a look at these examples across the customer journey.
Upgrade Your Onboarding Emails
An email welcoming your customer to their new program, product or service should be exciting. You’re about to embark on a new relationship, and your customer has a bright future ahead of them. Why send a boring email?
Make your welcome email just as exciting by welcoming them with a special video made just for them. Let your customer know they can expect easy to understand, valuable information from the start — even if it’s about a topic as nuanced as mortgages. Take a look at the onboarding video PHH Mortgage delivered to new customers.
Each data-driven explainer video included information that would be the most helpful and relevant for the viewer — from their official start date to their loan type and beyond. By tailoring video content to the viewer’s unique situation, customers could clearly understand every aspect of their mortgage journey, starting their relationship with the brand on a positive, personal note.
And if the customer did forget something? They could rewatch the video as needed for a quick reminder.
Upsell With Style
You have to stand out in your customers’ crowded inbox. So if you’re looking to create an email campaign upselling an additional product or service, you need to reach out with the right message at the right time. Show you’re recommending offers that are truly valuable when they need it most — insead of an irrelevant, pushy email they’re likely to ignore.
This dynamic video campaign created by Vodafone recommended additional policies to customers, based on their industry. Customers weren’t simply offered extra services, they were recommended options that would actually be of value to them.
By speaking to every user’s unique interests, they’re more likely to engage with your email campaign and explore your content.
Emails That Show You Care
You don’t have to restrict your emails to your new customers or the perfect upsell opportunity. Instead, try celebrating the wins they make along their journey with an email campaign highlighting the milestones they’ve met.
Videos are a great tool for storytelling. And what better story to tell than the one your viewers resonate with most — their own? Check out the year in review WW (formerly Weight Watchers) sent to their audience. Their multi-channel approach distributed the video in-app, via a dedicated video landing page and — of course — through email.
Customers are used to businesses reaching out with an email to make a sale. A data-driven year-in-review video is a welcome surprise, providing valuable insight into all they’ve achieved.
And when they’re done watching, their video can be easily shared with friends and family to show off the progress they’ve made, compare results and more. A dynamic highlights reel takes your email content beyond their inbox and onto social media platforms, giving your customers bragging rights (and your company free advertising).
Dynamic Video Creative That Gets Results
Ready to personalize your video email campaigns? Doing it without the right technology is all but impossible. Think about it — do you have time or budget to film or animate a unique video for every email recipient?
But there is a solution. Connect your CRM data to your video creative so you can automatically infuse customer data into each video. Add those dynamic videos to your emails — an integration with HubSpot or Salesforce works well — and take your email personalization to the next level.
We help our clients personalize their brand communications (including email) with dynamic video that gets results. Are you ready to enhance your email campaigns? Speak to one of our video experts today to get started.
