Video Email Marketing: A Simple Guide to Boost Clicks

Video is a powerful medium to convey your message among a wider audience. People spend more time on web pages with videos than on pages without video content. Email is also an excellent marketing tool. When combined, these two can work wonders. 

The attention-grabbing ability of videos and high customer engagement rates of email is an ideal combination which can deliver mind-blowing results in a very short time. 

This is why video email marketing is highly effective for boosting clicks on your website. So, let’s find out how you can use video content for email marketing of your business. 

Benefits of Video in Email Marketing

A well-designed video captures audience attention in a way lengthy text can’t. It creates a personal connection between the brand and the viewers. This is why people prefer watching videos over reading long emails. 

More importantly, any information presented in an explainer video is more memorable for the viewers. 

So, it’s high time you add videos to your emails as it increases the click-through rate by an average of 300%. Once the power of video is combined with the marketing strength of emails, it transforms into a profitable marketing tool. 

The Purpose of Embed Videos in Your Emails

Why do we suggest you embed videos in your email? The reason is - by simply attaching videos, your email would look like just any other piece of text with a clickable link. This won’t attract as much attention as it deserves. 

Unfortunately, some of the biggest email service providers such as Gmail and Outlook don’t allow embedded video. This may result in your embedded videos getting turned into spam and missing your inboxes. 

Besides, if you embed your video incorrectly, it might fail to play at all. This could be harmful for the email marketing of your brand. 

How To Embed Video in Your Email Correctly?

You can embed videos in your email without getting penalized by various email service providers. 

The image & link setup is the best solution for providing the benefits of video without creating any issues in email deliverability. 

This technique works because the video isn’t sent as part of your email. Instead, the video is embedded as a clickable link, which further eliminates any deliverability issues as links don’t really go into spam. 

Step 1 - Create an Impressive Thumbnail Image

The thumbnail acts as a play button that your viewers can click on to watch your video. There are plethora of ways to create a compelling video thumbnail such as mentioned below:

• Take a screenshot of your video and add text overlay to it and create your own thumbnail

• Make a thumbnail template - It builds a brand for your video and makes it identifiable among other different thumbnails

• Add a play button symbol - A thumbnail that looks like a video with play button works better than a simple screenshot

• Make use of text in your thumbnail - Some amount of text gives context to your video so that viewers are more likely to watch it

Creating a thumbnail of the right size is also important as the entire process of uploading the thumbnail makes it quite hassle-free. 

Step 2 - Upload The Video

You must upload your video to a video hosting site so that you can link it to your email service provider. YouTube is the best option as it gets a large amount of traffic on a daily basis and would end up providing you organic traffic for your video. 

There are several video hosting platforms available such as Vimeo. Whatever platform you pick, remember that you must copy the video’s URL. 

Step 3 - Link to Your Video

Now it's time to insert the thumbnail in your email and link the image to your video. 

Different email service providers have different processes for creating clickable links. However, the process generally is as follows:

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• Add the thumbnail into the email
• Pick the image 
• Click on the ‘add link’ button
• Choose the option to link to a internet address 
• Then, copy the video’s URL in the given field for the link 
• Finally, save your changes

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Once the thumbnail is linked to the video, you can test it. 

Step 4 - Add Text to Your Video

Though your video and its thumbnail is quite powerful in attracting viewers, it would help you a little more if you add a short piece of text to it.

Add some text to your email describing why people should watch your video along with a CTA prompting them to click. Tell your audience all that they would learn after watching the video. Also, be sure to make them understand what they are supposed to do after watching your video. 

Keep the text concise. Focus on the email marketing video. 

Step 5 - Send a Test Email

This step is a must! All you have to do is send a test mail to yourself and check whether the link works or not. 

Why Is This Method of Embedding Videos Better?

Embedding videos in this manner may not provide you an entirely seamless experience as the video never plays directly in the inbox of the recipient. However, this technique does offer a few benefits that a direct-play method doesn’t provide. 

• Better control over the viewer’s experience

As the video plays outside the recipient’s inbox, you can post it on a custom landing page where you have full control over the CTA, messaging as well as other links of the page. 

No doubt this will be a little more complicated than just simply uploading the video on any hosting site like YouTube. But, it’ll give you far greater control over the user experience while eliminating all other distractions in the recipient’s inbox. 

• Lesser email deliverability issues

 A direct-play video doesn’t really guarantee that the emails will get blocked or marked as spam. But, the chances increase. 

Spam filters are usually cautious of any non-standard email content, including emails that get large files along with them in the inbox. So, if you embed a video directly, you’ll have to work more to ensure that your email is received in the inbox instead of the spam folder. 

• Provides access to better analytics 

Any email marketing process is able to track key functions such as click-through rates and open rates. 

Directing the audience to a separate page generates even more trackable actions and provides you with more data for optimizing your emails. You’ll be able to learn how many viewers are actually watching your videos and how many take action after watching. 

Enjoy More Benefits of Email Marketing with Video

Video is an amazing form of content. It attracts higher engagement rates and often compels people to drop their activities for watching it.  

If you add video to your emails, it’ll certainly improve your email marketing’s performance. However, the quality of the video does matter a great deal. 

There are a variety of tools and software available to create eye-catching & compelling videos for your target audience while it’ll also help you do personalized video email marketing. 

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