Using video in your email marketing can be very effective in engaging with your audience for a number of reasons. In this article, we'll go over how to do it right, with steps and examples along the way. Read on to find out how to use video in your email marketing.
The post How to Use Video in Your Email Marketing appeared first on mailfloss.
Email marketing is one of the most popular strategies within digital marketing and in 2019, over 293 billion emails were sent… per day.
Video marketing is a younger trend, but over the past few years it has grown at an astonishing rate. To the point that right now, in 2020, 85% of businesses use it in their digital strategy.
You might be one of the business-owners who takes advantage of both email marketing and video content in order to grow your online presence. And if you’re not… it’s something to think about.
But, have you ever thought about bringing the two strategies together and including video in your emails and newsletters?
It might seem like a ludicrous idea at first. But we promise that by the end of this article you’ll have countless video email marketing ideas bubbling up in your mind.
Read on!
Before we get into the “how” of video email marketing, it’s important that we go through the “why”.
After all, you need to have a good reason to invest your team’s time and effort into adding video to your email marketing.
Luckily, there are more than enough reasons that will convince you of just how powerful this strategy is, including the following three:
The email in itself won’t do much for your rankings. But you might experience an indirect effect because of how shareable this type of content is.
In fact, videos tend to generate 12 times more social shares than text or images.
Needless to say, you’ll have to put in work in order to create a video that people will want to share. You can do so by making sure it is engaging, creative, and relevant to your target.
If you manage to make a video that ticks all those boxes, you increase your chances of getting shares on social media. Which in turn may boost the visibility of your content and indirectly improve your search engine rankings.
Additionally, if you embed the video in the email, each time a user watches it, your view count goes up. This will also help you rank your video even better on the platform that you chose to host it.
According to a study conducted by Sezion, when you include video in your emails you can increase your click-through rate by 55%. And you make users spend 44% more time reading it, which will help you improve your conversion rate by 24%.
Need we say more?!
Since video is so engaging and easy to consume, people won’t mind spending a few minutes listening to what you have to say. And if you use your ‘air time’ cleverly, you can increase brand affinity and increase the likelihood they become consumers.
All of this would be possible with text content, of course, but you’d have a harder task in hands!
We said it before and we’ll say it again. When it comes to digital content, video is as easy to consume as it gets. And that explains why most users love it and want more of it.
As a business with an online presence, it’s important that you always keep two things in mind:
The moral of the story is simple: users want easy content and it doesn’t get much easier than clicking play and watching a video.
We mentioned before that there are several ways to go about including video in your emails. If that made you a bit confused, worry not, we’re about to explain exactly what we meant.
Contrary to what you might be thinking right now, you don’t necessarily need to include the video itself in your email. You just need to make sure that your subscribers understand clearly that there is a video they can watch.
Using a static image with a play button on top is a foolproof way of doing so.
All you need to do is take a (high-quality, interesting-looking) screenshot of the video and put a play symbol on top (which you can do in a matter of minutes using an online image editor).
Save it, add it to the email as you would with any other image, and voilà!
Most email clients support GIFs, so creating one to work as the video in your email is also a great alternative. GIFs in email marketing is great.
It is a bit trickier than using a static image. You’ll need to learn how to create the GIF from the video, but it is also more engaging and captivating than the image.
The good news is that nowadays there are plenty of GIF creating tools online and many are even free to use. A few examples you could look into are GIPHY’s GIF maker, Make a GIF and GIMP.
Lastly, you can choose to embed the actual video in the email, by editing your email HTML code.
However, this third option comes with a few drawbacks.
Firstly, you need to consider which email clients the majority of your subscribers use. Because some of these clients don’t support video content yet (including big ones, like Gmail and Outlook, which show a fallback image instead). And if people can’t even see that there’s a video in the email, all your efforts will be in vain.
Secondly, you need to look at the size of the video (no matter how short it is). If it is too heavy, it will slow down the loading speed and cause many subscribers to give up on watching it.
Lastly, along with embedding the video, you’ll have to implement custom click tracking. That way you can keep up with how many subscribers actually click play and watch until the end.
Now that you know why you should adopt video email marketing and how you can add the videos, it’s time to learn the pro-tips! With these tips, your subscribers will click play, making your time and effort worth it.
We didn’t mention it before but the benefits of using video in your email marketing strategy start before the subscriber even opens your email.
In fact, it can boost your open rate by 19%. All you need to do is make sure you include the word “video” in your subject line.
As we established earlier, users are such big fans of video content. Adding the word will grab their attention and make them feel curious as to what’s inside the video.
If you don’t have a creative way of including the word in the subject line, don’t worry. You can simply put in brackets or in caps at the beginning of the subject, like so:
Getting users to open your email is only phase one of this marketing mission. Phase two is getting them to click play and watch your video. One of the main strategies here is to pick your thumbnail carefully.
Think about it, when you scroll through YouTube, there are some thumbnails that grab your attention way more than others.
Why is that? What do those thumbnails have that many others lack? And how can you apply that to your industry and target audience?
Since we’re talking about thumbnails, remember to adjust the size and compress them before you add them to the video. You don’t want to send an email that is too heavy and too slow.
Each of your video campaigns as a business goal.
You need to be clear about what you want from the viewer, both in the video and out. Whether you want users to buy your products, attend an event, enroll in a course, or watch a webinar, tell them.
That’s exactly where a good CTA will come in handy.
Remember the best practices when it comes to creating CTAs; That it needs to be compelling, well-designed, strategically placed, and easy to find. Do that and you’ll be just fine!
People love videos, but they might be in a situation where watching one isn’t an option.
Perhaps they don’t have time at that moment. Or they can’t put the sound on. Whatever the reason might be, you need to make sure that you get the message across by including some text around your video.
Additionally, this piece of text (when placed before the video) might also work as the last push someone needs to click play. It’s almost certain that some of your subscribers will need some context before they take some of their time to listen to you.
This means, of course, that your copywriting needs to be just as good as your video, so take some time to create it!
33% of users stop watching a video after the 30-second mark, 45% after the one-minute mark, and 60% after the two-minute mark.
That alone gives you a pretty good idea of the maximum amount of minutes your video should last for. And it also means two things:
Over 50% of all video consumption is mobile, and up to 77% of all emails are opened on a mobile device.
As such, it’s easy to understand why your emails with video need to optimized for smartphones.
Not considering how your video will play on mobile devices is bad. It might mean giving up on a big portion of your potential opens, clicks, and conversions. Which defeats the purpose of this whole thing!
Any campaign you create and strategy you add to your online presence needs to be monitored. Otherwise, how will you know if it is working or if it needs to be adjusted?
Both the email marketing tool you use and the platform where you host your videos should provide you with comprehensive reports. They should show all the important metrics for you to understand. Use these to decide where to take your video email marketing strategy. And if they don’t, it might be time to look for new ones.
All you need to do is view them regularly and assess which changes need to be tested to improve results.
We gave you all the tips and tricks you needed to start including video content in your emails. And now it’s time for you to put them in action. Do things right and we can guarantee that you’ll start to notice results and your brand will grow like never before. Good luck!
In this interview mailfloss chats with Ardath Albee, a B2B marketing strategist with over 30 years of business management and marketing experience. She’s a strategist, storyteller, speaker, blogger, teacher, and content geek who is obsessed with helping companies become so damn relevant that buyers can’t help but choose to become customers and, once a customer, making sure they’d never think of leaving.
The post The Intersection Where Buyer Personas and Email Marketing Meet appeared first on mailfloss.
A buyer persona is a composite sketch of a target market based on validated commonalities that actively informs content strategy to drive productive buyer engagement.
At mailfloss we’re focused on helping email marketers get the most from their email marketing campaigns. We do this in a few different ways. First, we help email marketers improve their deliverability through the use of our email list verification service. Secondly, we work hard to educate email marketers on the various topics relating to running a successful email marketing campaign.
Today, mailfloss had the opportunity to chat with Ardath Albee, a B2B marketing strategist with over 30 years of business management and marketing experience. She’s a strategist, storyteller, speaker, blogger, teacher, and content geek who is obsessed with helping companies become so damn relevant that buyers can’t help but choose to become customers and, once a customer, making sure they’d never think of leaving. Today, mailfloss was lucky enough to chat with Ardath about effective ways to use email marketing to reach (and convert) your target audience.
Without further ado, let’s jump into the interview.
Hi Ardath and thanks for joining us today to talk about your experience in the marketing space. Today we have an interesting interview planned with you because a lot of the areas of focus do not deal specifically with email marketing but are interesting when looked at through that lens. So let’s kick off the interview by talking a little bit more about how understanding buyer personas has the potential to increase the impact and effectiveness of an email marketing campaign.
B2B buyer personas are actually integral to the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. The purpose of sending a marketing email is to get a click. Period. The best way to get that click is with a message that resonates with your target audience. And the best way to create relevant content is to really know what your audience cares about. Buyer personas are the tool that informs your content strategy and messaging – including your email marketing campaigns.
To do a level set: “A buyer persona is a composite sketch of a target market based on validated commonalities that actively informs content strategy to drive productive buyer engagement.”
The keys to that definition are target audience and commonalities. Base your persona on role, not title. There can be many different titles for folks with the same responsibilities and objectives, so focus on role. Then identify the things they care about that they have in common. The objective of a buyer persona is to help you engage the widest swath of your target market by focusing on the things most relevant to as many of them as possible.
As you mention on your website, buyer personas help businesses create content that their target audience may relate to best. What low-fi, low-cost strategies can smaller startups use to help them build and better understand their buyer personas?
If you have a phone, you’ve got your low-fi, low-cost option at hand. The secret to buyer personas, that actively inform marketing strategy, is talking to your customers. It’s best to talk to those who have purchased within the last year to 18 months because you want them to remember their buying process – what questions they had, what resources they used, what the tipping point was that put them in market, etc.
I’ve found that it’s best to only ask for 30 minutes from each customer if you want to get your interviews scheduled quickly. Asking for more delays the process. And, they’re helping you out. Make sure you’re ready with the questions to ask and that you don’t waste time asking something you can learn from their LinkedIn profile, closed-end questions, or anything that isn’t actionable. For example, demographics, family situation, salary, lifestyle are not things you use in B2B marketing.
Some questions to include:
The other thing you’ll want to do is talk to your sales reps and ask them who they engage with at prospect companies and what questions they’re being asked. Ask them why buyers in deals they lost chose an alternative. This helps validate what you’ve heard from customers. I recommend you do this before you build personas, so you know you’re building personas to attract the right prospects that your sales reps want to engage.
There is no substitute for talking to your customers. If you make up the buyer persona based on what you think, you’re not only introducing bias (you’re not the customer) but you’ll also lack the nuance that helps you differentiate your messaging from that of your competitors. There’s a reason your customers choose you over the competition. You need to know what that is.
Once they start better understanding their buyer persona, how should this impact the content contained within their email marketing campaign?
One of the most off-putting things about marketing content is when we use language that is ours, not that of our buyers. Research conducted with buyers shows they’re begging for relevance and for marketers to stop the fluff and overt sales pitches. The truth is, they don’t care about your products, they care about what outcomes they can get that they couldn’t without them. They want their problem solved.
Listen carefully to how your customers talk about their industry, the problem they were solving and the outcomes they were looking for. Use those words and phrases in your email messaging and marketing content. You’ll find much higher levels of engagement because your content will resonate with them naturally.
On your website, I really like how you say, “one-off content is not content marketing.” Would you also argue that one-off emails are not email marketing? Why / why not? How do you approach building a bigger strategy around content marketing?
One-off anything is a bad idea in marketing – in my opinion. The more connected the story you tell, the easier it is to gain and keep attention across the long haul.
For example, let’s say you create an email marketing campaign that has five touches and lasts for two months. If it takes prospects an average of six months to go through their buying process you’ve just cut them off at the knees when your campaign ends at the two-month mark. They’ve engaged. They’re interested. They’re following along…and then…nothing. But then you start your new campaign and they’re sitting there wondering what happened to the “story” they were interested in learning more about?
Buyer personas will help you understand what the entirety of the buying process entails so you can focus on building that story and moving them through it (and through their buying process) as it unfolds. The additional benefit you have is that taking a “serial storytelling” approach to your email marketing programs also helps them remember your brand. You’re the consistent one they can count on for more of the information they want and need. You’ve got staying power and consistency. A key part of the buying decision is how they feel about you as a vendor – not just your product. Showing them how comprehensive your expertise is to help them goes a long way.
And, in case you think running a continuous campaign is limiting, it’s not. Your personas will help you see that. Remember when you interviewed them and asked what they needed to learn about to make the buying decision? Answering those questions is one key to creating a compelling story with your buyer as the hero. And, the beauty is that as more questions come up, you can add them to the story and keep expanding it over time. No more reinventing the wheel for every campaign.
You also mention on your site that content marketing is an “orchestration of relevant ideas and concepts that resonate with all of the different perspectives on the buying committee”. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by“orchestration”. What parts are at play here?
One of the things we’re not privy to as marketers are the conversations that go on internally with our customers. Depending on what types of companies you sell to, this can include 11 or more people – all with differing roles and perspectives. Our content needs to address those varying perspectives to help our buyer get them all on the same page. So think about the opportunity to send an email to your buyer with a message about how “this content” will help their (Director of X) understand the value of choosing (your product) to solve the problem. Here’s what’s in it for them…
As you point out on your site, buyers are “self-educating”. Can you tell us a little bit more about the intersection where education and email marketing meet? In your opinion, how important is education as an email marketing content type?
Education is critical. Think about it this way. Even if your prospect has purchased what you sell a few years back, chances are that there are new things to consider now. Think about how fast products evolve, technology most of all.
But take a step back from that. Your prospects likely have a way to do whatever it is that your solution solves for today. They may not even realize they have a problem. Or they may know they have a problem but don’t understand what they can gain by fixing it or the true cost of not fixing it.
Your audience is most likely to spend time engaging with your email if it teaches them something new or provides a new perspective to consider. Education comes in many forms. I’d argue that nearly all marketing is educational in some way. Why do your prospects read your case studies? I’d say it’s to learn how others, like them, solved the problem they’re facing by choosing your solution.
You also mention that content must serve as an enticement to push people to engage with your sales reps. You mention that “getting prospects in sales conversations is a primary objective of digital content strategy.” How does this play out as it relates to email content?
There are many ways to answer this question for B2B. The first is that the whole point of content marketing (and arguably email marketing) is to create engagement with customers and potential customers. If your messaging and the content you share are focused on addressing your audience’s needs in a way that’s relatable and helps them see themselves solving their problem, prospects will reach out to speak with sales as a result of that value provided.
Another way to answer this question is that if your nurturing program is well designed and engagement is high, then there can be several trigger points where sending an email asking them to request a demo or a conversation with your sales team is appropriate – and may just be the nudge the prospect needs because it comes at a time when they’re ready to take a next step.
A third way is to create email sequences for your sales reps to send out to the prospects they’re pursuing, offering valuable insights in exchange for a conversation. By helping create this sequence, you have a better shot at having the story your sales reps are sharing match the story marketing is sharing so you have a consistent narrative across the buying cycle. There’s nothing worse than a prospect thinking they know “you” and then receiving an email from a sales rep that’s completely out of left field given the content they’ve been viewing.
You also believe it’s content that will set a company apart from its competition. What do you mean by this and how would you respond to people who would disagree with you and say it's primarily the product that separates one company from another?
Nobody cares about your product. Period. No one. What they care about is what the product can do for them that they couldn’t do without it. They care about what’s in it for them (WIIFM) which generally means solving a problem that’s keeping them from meeting objectives.
In a B2B complex purchase, there’s a lot of inherent risk. People get fired for making the wrong choices. A B2B complex purchase is a major change management initiative. It usually means that people are going to have to change to adopt the new solution. People don’t like change – including your buyers. There are two things that I’ve seen become primary reasons why purchases result in no decision or a lost deal.
To apply this to email marketing, it’s important to consider the emotional component of your emails. How does your audience feel when your email hits their inbox? Do they snarl, think ‘you, again’ and hit delete? Or do they open it with anticipation to see what helpful information you’re sharing today? Those are pretty much your choices. Obviously, you want the latter response. What drives that is the content and messaging.
In answer to the first reason above, provide clear information focused on adding value to your prospect’s search for an answer to their challenge. In answer to the second, exhibit the qualities that builds a predisposition to trust you based on the quality of the information your email deliver. If your sales team exhibits this same care and value, the consistency of experience will keep your prospects predisposed to choosing your solution – as long as the product delivers what they need.
Lastly, let us throw a hypothetical scenario at you. You’re offered a new job at a small startup with no formal marketing department. You’re given one week on the job to implement the three most important systems or processes that will help this company grow in the long run. What are the three things you work on this week and how do you get them off the ground?
The three things I’d implement are:
I made several assumptions and one week isn’t a lot of time. I assumed that the website was passable, but not really showcasing a kick-butt, buyer-driven story. In order to change this, I’d need to talk to customers quickly to discover the story that will stick and pull others in. If I can get 10, 30-minute phone calls with customers, I can do this – or at least a phase 1 buyer persona – enough to get started. Quick chats with the sales reps and founders will give me additional insight I can gather quickly that will help to ensure alignment between the company and its target market.
The other assumption I made is that the startup needs awareness and content for the sales team. A blog can help with both. Buyer personas will identify the questions your prospects have and what they need to learn to buy your product. Answering those questions gives you an editorial calendar for the blog.
Once you have those things, you can do a lot to have marketing contributing to the startup. And, it’s important to consider that in a startup, marketing must wear a lot of hats. Sales enablement is one of them.
Thank you greatly for taking the time to chat with the mailfloss email marketing blog readers today Ardath. We really appreciate you taking the time. To our audience, if you’d like to learn more about Ardath and the work she does, you can follow her on Twitter or head over to her website here.
