Marketing with Video and Rich Media Blog

4 Advantages of Adding Video to your Email Marketing

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The good folks at  Wistia – a video tracking company decided to, in their words,  ‘eat their own dog food’ by using their own online video tracking service to monitor the effectiveness of adding video to their email marketing activities. (I prefer ‘fly your own jets’ as far as marketing metaphors go…)

You can read the results on a recent blog post but here is a quick summary:

1. Click through rates were 3 to 4 times higher with video
2. Visitors spend more time on site with video
3. You can track specific benefits of video content – see where visitors lost interest or chose to engage the company further
4. They also used video engagement as an indication for further lead gen, with measured success.

Admittedly the last two items are associated with the services this company provides but there are hundreds of articles and blog posts that support the idea that adding video to your email can have a significant effect on the effectiveness of that email. Here are a few:

http://www.smartmarketmovie.com/eric/videos-email-marketing-campaign/

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/2009/08/video-email-when-to-use-it.html

http://www.strongmail.com/resources/blogs/email_marketing_insights/2009/03/how-to-leverage-video-in-your.php

You should be adding video to your email marketing activities

 

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A number of recent reports (see links below) are claiming that adding video to your email is a great way of increasing the effectiveness of your email marketing program. Currently the best way to add video to an email is to include a graphic (screen capture) in the email that looks like a video player and that links through to video hosted on your site or elsewhere. There are other options to actually include video within your email but these methods are not consistent, easy to implement or proven (see links below for more detail).

Anecdotally, the evidence is very encouraging:

“When not linking to video his click through rate is between 20-27%…when linking to online video it’s consistently between 51-65%”

 “… a screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link.”

“Linking to video doubles click through rate”

“ another example, Eric Guerin reported a 175% increase in clickthroughs when video content was included in his company’s email”

 Bottom line, if you have have video assets you should be testing them in your email marketing campaigns.

 

 Articles and Reports on Email Marketing with Video:

http://www.getelastic.com/embedded-video-email/

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/2009/03/video-email-current-practices.html

http://www.smartmarketmovie.com/eric/videos-email-marketing-campaign/

http://stylecampaign.com/blog/?p=36

 

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