Should I Use Explainer Videos in My Email Marketing?

If you’ve been in the marketing world even for a short amount of time, or if you’re an avid read of our blogs (😉), you know video makes everything better. So, if you find yourself asking “Should I use explainer videos in my email marketing?” the answer is yes. 

But! Here’s the thing. Implementing explainer video into your emails can be tricky. When done correctly, video is shown to pull in a 40% average open rate, which if you have any experience with email marketing, you’ll know is hard to achieve. However, it’s easy to mess up the embedding process, which can absolutely ruin your campaign, so make sure you’re following best practices.

What are those best practices? We’ve got them all here for you. 

Why Use Video in Email Marketing?

Before we dive in, let’s review why video is good to use in your email marketing. Aside from upping your email open rate, videos can:

• Get your point across easily and quickly
• Retain viewer attention
• Save both you and your contacts time
• Establish a strong sense of branding

How to Embed

This is going to be the most crucial part of using video in your email marketing. If you do not properly embed your video, it (obviously) won’t play, but even worse, could prevent the email from sending properly, or could even put you on a spam list. 

The first thing to understand, is that to send an entire video via email most likely won’t work because there are still many email clients out there that don’t support playing videos within email. Unless you use a tool like TailoredMail, or use HTML5 to embed the video where it can be played on email clients that support video (like Apple Mail, iOS 10, etc), it’s actually best to upload an image of the video you want to show and embed the link into the image. 

Most automation softwares like Mailchimp have software built in that can do this for you automatically, but if not, it’s simple enough to upload an image and attach a link to it. 

Another option is to upload a .GIF of your video to still give your email a sense of movement, or to make it look like you’ve uploaded a clip from your video. 

Check and Double Check

Just like any other email campaign you send out, once you’ve got the video you want to send embedded into your email, it’s crucial you send test emails out to make sure your links work, and your images show up properly. Make sure to send your emails to a variety of clients, and check it on mobile devices, so you can see what it will look like on any platform. 

Campaign Ideas to Implement

So now that all the boring stuff is out of the way, let’s get to talking about the creative stuff. Sure, just throwing out a video to your email contacts is a fun way to get them to engage more, but with a little more planning, you can really turn your email marketing strategy into a success. Here are some ideas to consider:

• Create a series of videos to send out bi-weekly, giving your contacts something to look forward to.
• Send product review or tutorial videos to shoppers who abandoned their cart.
• Feature customer testimonials or staff interviews to humanize your business.
• Try using the word “video” somewhere in your subject line. Even that is proven to get more opens!

Just remember to keep the video short, attention spans are thinning out as the years go on.

Use Great Videos

Of course, none of the above will be any help to you unless you have a great video. With an animated explainer video in your marketing arsenal, there is no limit to your awesome marketing power. There’s so much you can do with a video besides just email marketing, but only if that video is of high quality and explains your brand story well.

And who better to create a video like that than a 17-time Emmy™ award winning studio?  

We’re not trying to toot our own horn (too much) but at Digital Brew, we’re beyond confident we can provide you with an excellent video that not only tells your story well, but makes you money. 

Wanna learn more? We’d love to chat! You can set up a time with us here!