The Complete Guide to Video Email Marketing

Video email marketing is one of the most innovate and effective types of marketing that you can pursue in the modern age of marketing. It allows you to share visual stories in a means that is still effective and gets directly to people.

In this guide, we are going to cover everything you need to know to make effective email campaigns that leverage video. 

Let’s get started…

Step 1 – Identify your goals

Before you begin building your campaign it’s important to write down your goals. This allows you and your team to clearly establish the path forward for your email marketing. Your strategy should be tailored to your goal, whether it’s to get signups or bring exposure to an ebook. Overall, think about your goals in the context of building a movement around your business.

Step 2 – Opt-in or nothing

There are no shortcuts in email marketing. I know that is sometimes hard to hear, however, methods that involve acquiring emails that didn’t opt-in can be more detrimental than you may think. Build up a subscriber base with social media content that promotes your email list. Opt-in subscriptions are the only way to get real results. You’ll thank me later.

Step 3 – Create video content

When creating content for your emails, prioritize video. Text, graphical and audio content are all formats that are important. That said, video should be the centerpiece in your content ecosystem. And there’s a good reason for that! Video has been proven to keep people engaged while building relationships that last. People just prefer watching videos. It’s effective when graphical and text content in emails is used in conjunction with videos to provide value while also fostering curiosity. Use animated gifs with a video play button to get them to click on your videos. Keep in mind the first few seconds of the video should hook the viewers as much as possible.

Step 4 – Package the email

Take time to optimize the way you package an email. Tell people what you are offering them in the subject line – they can’t predict what is on the other side of an email – and make sure to be clear and honest every step of the way. Format the graphics and text in an aesthetically pleasing way, good design in the email and on your landing page will help increase conversions. Also, remember to format your email for mobile devices – the more you optimize, the better! Don’t be surprised if 80-90% of your engagement is on mobile devices.

Step 5 – Build the funnel

See your email sequence as a funnel

• email opens
• email clicks
• landing page views
• call-to-action clicks
• conversions

When the goal of your email is to get conversions, developing your landing page is key. It’s been proven that using a video on your landing page is the best way to capture leads, increase conversions, and build your brand. In fact, our data shows that putting a video on a landing page, increases conversions by up to 300%.

Step 6 – Data tracking

Look at all the data that you can find. Open rates can be helpful to show the impact of your subject lines. Remember that conversion rates can reveal the impact of your content. Use pixels and add analytics tracking on landing pages. This might sound strange, but get excited about unsubscribe rates! That improves your engagement rates and keeps your email list healthy, only delivering emails to those who want to read it. This is

Step 7 – A/B testing

Test everything, because often what you think doesn’t work ends up working the best, and vice-versa. Do single variant A/B tests to find solutions that work the best. Make sure your A/B tests focus on one aspect of the formatting or design so that you can reveal exactly what is working and what is not. The more A/B tests that you do, the more you will be able to improve your video email marketing results!

Step 8 – Personalize your emails

Build a relationship by sending your campaigns from a person instead of a company account. Use a personal email signature, and maybe even consider adding your personal phone number or Google Voice number! Also, it’s useful to make a Gravatar – a lot of email inboxes use the Gravatar service to display thumbnails icons of contacts. Add social media accounts in your email footer to grow your community. Add your company’s address to the footer to adhere to anti-spam laws. In general, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the laws that prevent spam in email marketing.

Step 9 – Timing the send

Carefully consider the time of day that you select to send your email campaign. Send times can vary based on the audience that you are catering to, seasonality, volume of other emails being sent, current events, and many other factors. With regards to statistics, take what you read on the Internet with a grain of salt, because industry metrics are changing at a fast rate due to advancements in technology and changes in consumer behavior. The best thing you can do is conduct your own research and then try different send times to see what works.

If you follow those 9 steps, you’re off to a great start boosting your email campaigns with video email marketing as your not-so-secret weapon.

Here are several types of emails that you can send.

Types of Emails

Automated emails

Dropbox does an excellent job of emailing people who have shown interest in their software but not fully installed the program. By setting up an automated email to those who have been inactive, you have a chance to lure them back to your eco-system again.

Webinar Announcements

An effective way to be seen as a leader in your niche is to run a webinar where you can showcase your knowledge. Hubspot does this well by illustrating how you will benefit from watching and includes a strong call to action with scarcity (and excitement) to get people to sign up. Just by adding a registration form, you are on your way to set up a successful webinar.

Welcome Emails

Buffer does this quite nicely by sending you a welcome email, with methods of contact, should you have any problems. Even just a simple email to introduce yourself is enough to establish a relationship with your new subscriber. Include any valuable content you have or links to content on your website.

Announcement Emails

An easy way to notify subscribers to the big changes within your company is to send out an announcement email. This keeps everyone in the loop and reminds your subscribers why they wanted to sign up with you in the first place. Postmates does announcement emails seamlessly, targeting users locally with new deals and discounts for deliveries. They also include new features and opportunities in the same email to keep their users engaged.

Free Trial Emails

For new subscribers, or those who have not fully signed up, sending them a free promo or trial for your software is a great way to lure them back into being active again. Kissmetrics does this well by sending out a VIP one-on-one demo offer that you can sign up for.

Some companies even offer their existing customers an upgrade option or premium add-on offer, including relevant information and discounts.

Upcoming Event Emails

Just like announcements, you can use B2B email marketing to promote an upcoming event. The trick to this is to create urgency, scarcity, and value so that your subscribers are incentivized to take action. Send out a series of timed emails with a countdown, as well as a notification on how limited the seats now are. Every email needs to spark more and more urgency. Vodaphone has an awesome strategy for event emails. They have a countdown clock and seamlessly set up their emails to create scarcity, urgency and extra value.

Case Study Emails

Nothing convinces a person to take action more than social proof. Depending on the number of subscribers, even one case study has enough power to lure in hundreds of new customers. Relate this case study to your target audience to make sure you have the right people taking action. Perfect Audience has a great email campaign to notify you of all the well-known businesses that use their product. So if other companies use their service, chances are, others will too!

Video Emails

We all know that videos are the future of marketing and connecting to your audience, so there is nothing better than including a video into your B2B email marketing plan. Dubb does this perfectly by allowing its users to attach a GIF preview of their video into the email, with a “play icon”. Once the user clicks to play, they will taken to a custom video landing page where they can watch the video (autoplay is an option, for desktop only).

Now you have learned about some of the top methods in each technique of B2B email marketing.

These email marketing examples display what a good email marketing plan can do for your business. Thanks for reading (and watching) and subscribe to our channels (@dubbapp)  for more videos!

If need help creating, hosting, sharing and tracking webcam, mobile and screen videos, request an invite to Dubb.