Brands that are already leveraging video in other avenues can easily bring video into their email marketing strategy. Brands that haven’t explored this option yet, what are you waiting for? Your consumers want to see more videos!
In this article, we’ll take a look at what video email marketing entails, some inspiring examples, tips and tricks, and a quick explainer on how to add video to your email.
Before we start, here’s a quick table of contents to help you navigate the article:
Video email marketing enables you to leverage video content to improve your email marketing strategy. It can cover multiple types of videos, such as product walkthrough videos, feature updates, etc. The goal is to increase engagement and brand recall while keeping the reader entertained.
Email video marketing can directly influence buying decisions as potential customers can watch a quick video of the product and make a decision. This strategy can also help your brand establish authority and thought leadership by promoting knowledge around something your readers want to learn about.
If your customers aren’t aware of a certain product, or if you’re launching something new, a timely email marketing video can work wonders. Video combines auditory and visual input to convince customers about the authenticity of what they’re watching.
Video email marketing examples
Let’s dive into some examples from brands who’ve done video email marketing well. Here’s a quick list of the brands and type of video email we’ll cover:
NOTIQ: Promote exclusive brand content
Hiut Denim: Build trust with behind-the-scenes videos
Island Olive Oil: Introduce your brand over a welcome email
Reternity: Announce a new product
Nearly Natural: Show your product in action
Ugmonk: Share how an influencer uses your product
Naked & Famous: Explain product features in a review video
Omnisend: Update your users on new features
Beardbrand: Engage customers with videos on topics they love
Baking Steel: Educate customers with your expert advice
NOTIQ: Promote exclusive branded content
If you’ve got a market-first product or a genre-defining idea, video email marketing is the best way to promote it. Take a look at how NOTIQ, a sustainable and fashionable personal brand, promotes content that’s not available anywhere else via a quick video email.
Notice how they’ve used a black and white tone to convey elegance, in line with the content of the video, which is on the topic of a “School of Elegance.” The messaging flows seamlessly from one section to another, and the CTA is bold and centred.
Hiut Denim: Build trust with behind-the-scenes videos
There’s nothing customers love more than a peek behind-the-scenes of their favorite brands. This is why BTS and blooper videos are so popular for movies and TV series.
Here’s a great example of a BTS (behind-the-scenes) video from Hiut Denim, which highlights the product and gives readers a sneak peek at the brand they might not otherwise get.
Island Olive Oil: Introduce your brand in a welcome email
For customers who have just signed up for your newsletter, or stumbled upon your website for the first time, a nice welcome email with a video would work well. Welcome emails let your customers know that you care about them, that you’re excited to work with them, and create a sense of trust in a new brand.
Island Olive Oil does a great job with welcome video emails. The “About us” video is prominently placed and addresses a specific pain point—getting to know a new brand.
Island Olive Oil uses lifecycle stages to generate 2710% higher revenue-per email, and generates 39% of email marketing streams from email automation. Read the full story here.
Reternity: Announce a new product
Video is a popular and exciting way to introduce a new product. You can increase engagement before and during product launches, showcase the quality of the products you make, and get more sales on the launch day. You can also build trust in customers by showing them visual proof of how good your product is.
In this email, Reternity, a luxury streetwear brand, makes use of animations to increase appeal. The video is also easy to spot because of the color choices within the video and the placement inside the email. It also has a prominent play button that looks irresistible, increasing CTRs and overall success metrics.
“Our emails are characterized by the fact that the look and feel is very clean and minimalistic. GIFs allow us to maintain this impression without cluttering our email.”
Moritz Kruse, Head of Email Marketing at Reternity
Nearly Natural: Show your product in action
Sometimes, all it takes for a customer to get convinced about your product is visual proof—and videos are a great way to deliver visual proof of your awesome products! Email marketing is the perfect avenue to deliver these videos too, since they offer a direct entry into a customer’s inbox and give you a way to add additional context via messaging and design.
In this example, Nearly Natural, a floral brand, leverages email marketing with video to establish trust in a product. The video specifically shows how the product works, what it looks and feels like, and the value-add it brings to any space.
Ugmonk: Share a product use case video with an influencer
Influencer marketing is a great way to bring more visibility to your brand via new content and distribution streams, build trust with a ready-made audience, and increase brand awareness among your influencer’s base. If you’ve got an influencer marketing setup and a video ready, you can add these to your emails and ensure that all your readers watch the video.
Ugmonk, a brand that designs aesthetic products, leverages an email marketing video to promote its latest campaign with an influencer, with a clear CTA and a prominent press to play button, and a quick one-liner description establishing the influencer’s authority and credentials.
Naked & Famous: Explain product features in a review video
A study from Optiminder shows that 55% of consumers watch a video before making a purchase. Review videos are crucial aspects of a buying decision, and brands are increasingly reliant on customers and influencers to create a review video that promotes their brand.
If you’ve got good relationships with the video creator, you can ask them to explain your product features over a review video, and leverage video email marketing to distribute this. Take a look at how Naked & Famous, a popular denim brand, does so:
Omnisend: Update your users about new features
If you’ve got an exciting new product or feature to announce, video is a nice avenue to utilize. Video adds a realistic aspect to the promotion and gives customers confidence that the product they’re interested in looks and performs as expected.
Product and feature announcement videos work especially well when there’s a complicated new concept to convey—and videos can simplify these concepts for the viewer. Here’s how Omnisend deploys video in email marketing to update their readers about new features. Watch:
Omnisend gives you ready-made templates, email, SMS, and push notification automation, personalization, and unlimited segmentation in one place. Join for free here.
Beardbrand: Engage customers with videos on topics they love
With the right tech stack and feedback loop, you should be able to figure out what kind of content your customers prefer and which ones they don’t. But if you’re really lucky, you’ll hit a theme that strikes a chord with customers and they’ll fall in love with any content you create around that topic.
This is a great opportunity to leverage video email marketing. You can create a video around any topic or theme your customers love, and share it over emails. Notice how Beardbrand, a men’s grooming company, sets the stage with enticing content and then introduces a relevant video. Everything about the email, be it the title, the description, the stylistic choices, the cover image for the video, tie in to the same narrative of “3 hairstyles coming back in style”:
Baking Steel: Educate customers with expert advice
Many consumers now prefer listening to or watching an expert give their two cents about a brand or product, and video is an increasingly common channel to do so. People intrinsically trust advice when it comes from a person of knowledge and authority, and brands can use this to their advantage.
Here’s an example of video email marketing from Baking Steel, a pizza cookware brand, which educates its email user base about “Thin Crust Pizzas.” This video is made more trustworthy with a relevant CTA that says “Watch and learn” rather than “Sign up now” or “Find out more,” both of which require high levels of commitment.
Now that you’ve seen examples of popular brands leveraging email video marketing for different goals and outcomes, let’s dive into the next step: setting up a video email campaign.
How to add video to an email
For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be using Omnisend, a popular omnichannel marketing software built for Ecommerce.
Omnisend allows you to set up email campaigns easily via pre-built templates, apply smart automations and workflows, segment your users according to varying degrees of traits, and personalize your emails accordingly. You also get SMS and web push notifications, signup forms and landing pages, reporting and analytics. Interested?
Step 1: Create a new email campaign
The first step of your email video marketing starts with setting up an email campaign. Once logged in, navigate to New Email Campaign > Campaign Settings > Choose a template.
At this stage, you can browse through hundreds of ready made email templates and choose the one that matches your needs best. You’ll notice that most email templates are perfect for ecommerce brands, this is because Omnisend is a platform designed specifically with ecommerce brands in mind.
Once you’ve picked a template of your choice, you can move on to the next step: adding the video.
Step 2: Choose where to add the video
Decide if you want to add a header, description, and then a video, or just start off directly with the video and add context later. You can also enter multiple sections of text to set up a story and deliver the video as the last piece of the puzzle.
Once you’ve decided where to add the video, you can navigate to the Library, click Quick Add > Video. This would be the second element in the second row of the menu, and it opens up the following screen:
Step 3: Add the video URL
Email video marketing best practices suggest that you shouldn’t upload a video directly to your email. It’s better if you leverage a video hosting platform (such as Youtube or Wistia), upload your video there, and add that uploaded video to your email.
For this step, you’ll need to retrieve the URL for your video from your preferred video hosting solution. Once you’ve done so, you can add the video URL to the “Video URL” field on the right side of your email editor, as shown in the screenshot below.
Once you’re done with this, you can click on “Finish editing,” and voila! You’ve added video to your email!
Pro Tip: Omnisend’s integration with Playable lets you send video marketing emails to your customers easily!
Video email marketing tips
Here are some tried-and-tested ways to ensure that you produce high-quality, engaging video emails with every campaign:
1. Add the word “video” in the subject line and preview text
This one might seem a little counter-intuitive, but it actually works in your favor to add the word “video” in the subject line and preview text! This encourages customers to open and engage with your email, telling them that your email isn’t the typical sales pitch that floods their inbox.
Here’s a quick example of how that would look: “Unboxing video alert! Watch it now.” You can also take a look at the examples from Reternity and NOTIQ below.
GIFs are super popular, relatable, and often humorous, and brands would be remiss not to consider them. So the next time you’re creating a video email marketing campaign, try adding a GIF as a preview of the video and build up some hype and excitement that encourages readers to click on and watch the video fully.
3. Introduce your video with a quick headline or text
It’s always good to keep your users informed about anything you present to them. Customers appreciate having additional context that helps them make a decision on whether or not to consume certain content.
In line with this, you should introduce your video with a quick headline or text, giving users as much context as possible before expecting them to click on your video. Here’s a quick example of how you can do so:
Remember, it doesn’t have to be anything complicated. It’s enough to deliver simple, compelling messaging that informs the reader what the video is about.
If you want to create eye-catching thumbnails with better visuals for your videos without spending a lot of time and money, consider using a free YouTube thumbnail maker.
4. Add a CTA button below your video
Customers who watch videos are highly engaged and possess high intent about interacting with your brand or product. You should capitalize on this and add a CTA right below your video, so that customers always know where to go next.
5. Define visibility for comfortable viewing
Before you send out your campaign, remember to mark which devices your video emails should be displayed on. This is a crucial step which ensures that none of your users have to struggle with poor video resolution or fit.
Email marketing providers like Omnisend have an inbuilt capability for you to make this selection.
Wrap up
Video is a valuable, engaging form of content that customers enjoy consuming. Brands can make the most of this by introducing video email marketing into their overall strategy.
Email video marketing can influence customers to close a purchase, convince them about the authenticity of a product, and give brands an avenue to explain and promote new features. Emails also give brands a new avenue to distribute the beautiful and interesting videos they create.
You can explore video email marketing for multiple objectives, such as educating customers, showing your product in action, promoting exclusive content, sharing product use cases, and more. If you’re wondering which tool you can use to support your email video marketing requirements, look no further! Omnisend is the perfect video email marketing software for you.
Get started with Omnisend today & drive sales on autopilot with pre-built automation workflows
Richard is a Content Marketing Manager at Omnisend. An avid writer, he's said to have been born holding a pencil. Fascinated by all things handmade, if he's not reading or writing he can often be found practicing leathercraft.
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