How Video Email Marketing Is Changing The Game For Good

Video has been hot for a while.

Branded YouTube channels have exploded, and more companies are creating short, impactful videos to use in their other marketing channels too.

A recent study found that 63% of businesses are using video as a marketing tool already — most of that as part of their content and social media marketing.

But there’s another marketing channel where you’re going to start seeing a lot more when it comes to video, and that’s email marketing.

While video email marketing isn’t exactly a new trend, it is one that’s growing in importance. WordStream found that marketers who are using video end up increasing revenue at a rate that’s faster than non-video users and having a video in an initial email increase the click-through rate by 96%.

Not bad, right?

While you can’t argue with those sorts of numbers, there are a couple of reasons why video email marketing is making a big impact; both now and for the foreseeable future.

People love visuals

Now, that’s not to say people don’t read text anymore, but there’s something about video that really triggers something special in our brains. We’re programmed to take in visuals more than text. And that actually has a special benefit too.

Check out these facts on video retention:

Forrester Research estimates one minute of online video equates to approximately 1.8 million written words. In addition, 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text.

So, your email list subscribers not only love watching videos, research shows that they are actually going to retain more information from watching them.

Matching video to content

Keep that retention number in mind because it matters when it comes to video email marketing.

Now, what we don’t mean is just shoving any old video into your emails and calling it a day.

Nope.

What you want to do is create emails that specifically enhance and augment your written content. It might be as simple as making a 10 second snippet that pulls in your best fact or the one point you want to get across.

When you tie your videos to your content, you can have a much bigger impact on your email subscribers because they are getting hit with that information through two different mediums. And that can be really impactful.

Use video to build trust

Today, it’s all about trust for brands. Buyers, and that’s both B2B and B2C, want more from companies than they used to. Now, they want to buy from brands who treat them more than just customer number 2434.

For a lot of brands that’s been a hard pivot to do authentically. But video can really help.

Video email marketing is one way to really embrace storytelling, something that consumers love because of the emotional impact and goes a long way towards building those ever important trust levels every company would love to have.

Encourage user interaction

Ask most email marketers something they wish they could see more of from their email list and engagement is often at the top of the list.

Well, one proven way to get readers to engage more with emails is to provide more ways for them to interact with the content they get.

Interactive content is one way to do that and interactive video can be the next step. In fact, some brands are already creating unique interactive videos for their email marketing campaigns.

Either way, adding a video to your emails is going to encourage the people on your list to actively click and watch what you’re sending, and that’s a very good thing!

Appeals to mobile users

More people are checking their emails on mobile devices today and video email marketing fits in really well with those changes.

Most people, including your email subscribers, are already used to and comfortable with watching videos on their phones anyway. Video is the perfect thing to catch on the go, people watch videos on their phones on the subway, standing in line, and during breaks.

Now add to that emails that feature video content that appeals right to them and they’re primed and ready to start watching right from their phones or tablets as soon as your email lands in their inboxes. Which means, they can start clicking or hitting those calls to action right away.

Start thinking about video email marketing

If you haven’t given much thought to adding videos to your emails, now is the time to start.

Video email marketing is just another tool that you can add to your overall marketing strategy that will not only improve a lot of your email marketing stats but also deliver better content directly to your readers.