People love to play online. Part of the appeal of Facebook is that it gives you so many opportunities to interact with people and with the companies you’re following. Email has traditionally been less interactive than websites or social media, but the current trend in email marketing is to enable interaction with the subscriber. That way, you can capitalize on the surfer mentality (give me something fun to do) while still taking advantage of the more personalized and intimate communication venue of email. Here are some ideas to get your subscribers involved.

• 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.

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Including video in an email can add life to the overall campaign.  It can also cause your messaging to fall short if the video isn’t done correctly. In order to use video effectively, you need to know when to use it, how to include it in your emails, and how to communicate effectively with your audience.

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:

Ok, let’s get this sorted quickly.  The answer is simply no.  Online video has been the new kid on the marketing block for quite some time, with companies big and small jumping in with some form of video marketing.

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.