• Ask for a vote

Whether it’s a vote on a new ice cream flavor, a cutest photo contest, or a new logo, asking for a vote gives readers a chance to click a button and get involved!  It also makes your subscribers feel valuable by encouraging them to influence the decision you make as a company.

• Include Video Links

While embedding a video in the body of your email isn’t a good idea, you can include links to videos hosted on your website. Ideally, you should include a linked screenshot of the video to arouse interest rather than a text-based link. Videos can engage subscriber attention by offering how-to demonstrations, funny clips, or new product demonstrations.

• Ask for Subscriber Input on a Marketing Concept

You can spin subscriber input a couple of different ways. If you’re brave, ask for subscriber submissions—photos, content, designs—and promise to include the winner on your site or in your next email. Or, you can simply ask subscribers to share experiences and ideas in a comments section on your website, giving them a link to click in the body of your email. This is an excellent option to showcase testimonials.

• Consider a Secondary Call to Action

If your email is primarily sales oriented, a secondary call to action can seek to engage subscribers who may not be quite ready to buy. Use any of the ideas above as your secondary call to action or simply give them an opportunity to find out more. The goal is simply to get them interacting without the commitment of hitting the buy button.

Subscriber interaction with your emails can provide excellent opportunities not only to direct people to your website, but to build anticipation in your audience for the emails that you send. Using eConnect Email’s tracking tools, you can test which campaigns produce the best results in order to generate emails that gain the attention and involvement of your subscribers.

When Video Is Better Than Text and Images Alone

Just because you can use video within an email doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Video should be used as a tool to communicate your message more effectively, not as a cool new gadget to impress subscribers. Specific instances in which video can be more effective than text and images alone include new product demonstrations, how-to demonstrations, and attention-grabbers.  An attention-grabber that makes someone laugh, ultimately results in that person sharing a link with a friend or visiting your site to find out more.  However, attention for its own sake usually isn’t helpful.

How to Use Video in Your Email Campaign

There are two primary options for adding video into your emails: embedded video and linked video. Embedding the video into your email is NOT recommended, as it’s extremely problematic and not widely supported.  In addition, embedding video directly into your email campaign will can also cause it to be mistaken for spam. Embedded videos also make it impossible to track the effectiveness of the campaign since you have no way of determining how many subscribers tuned in to actually watch the video. For these reasons, the better option is to use a linked screenshot in the body of the email instead. By clicking on the image, viewers will be directed to the location of where the video is hosted, enabling you to track click-through rates much more accurately.

Tips for Success with Video Email Marketing

Ultimately, your success with integrating video into emails will depend on how well you can merge the video element with text and images for better overall persuasion. Here are some tips to get you started:

• Support the video with brief but compelling copy, including a strong call to action.
• Keep the video short. Videos under one minute long usually perform best in an email setting.
• Build a strong landing page that restates the message of the video and points viewers toward your call to action.

As email marketing continues to evolve, eConnect Email stands ready to help you remain on the cutting edge. If you have additional questions about using video in next email campaign let us know.

Example:

Recently, Goodmail, a third-party reputation services provider (RSP), was talking about allowing email marketers to deliver their email with embedded video, for a price.  Sounds like a cool idea but I don’t know if that is going to work, unless they can convince not only the email clients and web-based email developers, but also the anti-virus, anti-spam and a load of other security developers to accept these embedded codes in email.  For now, it looks more like a dream to me, but hey, with the WWW, you never know.

But back to me saying “No video”.  That doesn’t mean you can’t be creative with your newsletters.  I’ve seen newsletters that have included a screenshot of a video that is linked to the actual video, so when recipients click on the screenshot, it will open up their browser and load the video. Smart move!

You could go further by animating a few frames from the actual video and saving it as a GIF animation (watch your file size though).  This would give your recipients a brief (and I really mean brief) preview of the video.  But it’s enough to do the job.