5 Times You Should Add Video to Your Email Campaigns

Your customers probably get a lot of emails, which makes it pretty difficult to stand out in their crowded inboxes. So when you finally get your customer to open your email, you can’t afford to waste that precious opportunity to connect with them.

What should you do? Well, we know video boosts email click-through rates, so sending video is the way to go, right?

The answer is: Yes, but with some caveats. The types of videos you send in your email campaigns matter more than blasting inboxes with any old piece of video content. We’re going to cover five types of videos you can send via email and what scenarios to send them in, so you can bring in more clicks and keep customers engaged.

1. Got new leads in the funnel? Say “Hi” with personalized welcome videos

Personalized welcome videos are a fantastic way to introduce customers to your company. With a 90-second (or less) video, you can kick off the customer onboarding process and create a deeper connection with your new prospect.

“Personalized” is the operative word here. When you’re making your welcome videos for your new prospects, don’t look at it as an opportunity to only talk about your company. On the contrary: Experts recommend you start out by demonstrating your understanding of the customer. Show that you did your research and you understand their pain points by talking a bit about their niche or industry and how they can better serve their customers.

After you’ve shown them you know where they’re coming from, you can take some time to explain how your organization addresses their pain points.

Cap off the welcome video with a Call to Action (CTA) that moves your customer further along in the sales funnel. Tell them how they can learn more about your product or service or get in touch with someone on your sales team. If you use Soapbox, you can embed a CTA directly in your video.

2. Improve your outreach with video voicemails

So, you’ve got a foot in the door with your customer, and now it’s time to connect them with your sales team. This is a perfect opportunity to send out a video voicemail.

At a high level, a video voicemail is a short video you send to someone to better connect with them. Think of a traditional phone voicemail, but made with a webcam.

Sales pros like Fernando have been using video voicemails for some time now to better connect with the customers they serve. They have seen impressive results, including a 42% increase in email click-through rates when they use video voicemails.

We dissected Fernando’s success and found four components that make for a good video voicemail:

• An attractive thumbnail, following our best-practice guide to stand out in a noisy inbox
• A short, personalized introduction and the reason you’re emailing the prospect
• A sprinkle of personality (smiles, everyone!)
• A next step for the prospect to take

When used correctly, sending a video voicemail can bump your sales outreach email click-through rate and build a stronger relationship with your customer — all while moving them further down the sales funnel.

3. If customers have questions, answer them with onboarding videos

Onboarding your customers and acclimating them to your company is just as important as onboarding new employees. According to a Wyzowl report, 86% of people are more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests time into onboarding content.

“86% of people are more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests time into onboarding content.”

The great part about building onboarding content is that it does double duty as library content. If your onboarding video contains info on how to get started with your services, you can also put that video on a knowledge base or how-to page.

Strong onboarding content educates your new customer at a high level about your company. Your onboarding video needs to do a few things and do them well. Read on to discover what these are.

Show Your Secret Weapons: The Humans Behind the Product

Give your team the spotlight here, and show the customer who they’re going to be working with. This presents another opportunity for you as sales professionals to provide the customer points of contact — both people and email addresses — in case they have follow-up questions.

Communicate Effectively

Be clear with your language, and get to the point quickly. Take advantage of the little time you have and craft a concise message from your sales team that explains your product’s features and how your services will benefit your customer.

Use Case Studies and Examples

One of the most effective ways to get your point across is to cite wins with other customers or bring up relevant, real-world examples of how your product or services helped people in the past.

For example, we love how Formlabs uses Wistia’s integrations with Marketo as well as our CTA and Chapters functionalities to help educate customers on their product and at the same time, push them further down the sales pipeline.

So break out those case studies and customer testimonials, weave them into your onboarding script, and you’ll be well on your way to convincing customers of your value.

Demo the Product

Finally, bring it all together by demonstrating your product. As you demo, show a quick shot of who is giving the demo (hint: this should be your sales team), get to the point quickly, weave in practical examples and former customers as wins, and close out the demo with a final CTA — something that makes folks want to dive deeper into your product or service.

4. Email your video event invitations

Event marketers live and die by the inbox. In 2019, a full 78% of event marketers said email is their most effective marketing tactic. A year earlier, 94% of event marketers that used video said they found it to be effective.

Knowing that, it only makes sense that video for email works for both invitations and pre-event announcements.

Just make sure to not confuse invitations with welcome videos. Invitation videos are focused on single events and are personal invites to attend, unlike welcome videos, which are built to be general introductions to your product or service.

Your invitation video should come from someone high up within your company or from the person who is leading the event. We love how personal this NAFSA conference video from Artie Media is. The conference leader, Katherine S. Hammett, invites viewers to join her in St. Louis, Missouri, to meet vendors and partners for what Hammett calls the world’s largest conference for international educators.

5. Bring customer stories to life with testimonials

A well-rounded marketing strategy includes more than just self-serving promotional messaging. Take yourself out of the picture and highlight how you’re helping customers succeed. Thoughtful testimonials can inspire prospects to take the plunge and introduce existing customers to new products and services that could help them grow in different ways.

Sprinkle these stories into newsletters, include relevant testimonials in sales emails, and map results to specific features during onboarding. There’s no going wrong when you let customers steal the spotlight.

An impactful testimonial will highlight a specific problem and clearly illustrate how your solution helped. Got data to support the success? Even better! Check out this recent example of a story we created with AlayaCare on how they increased their video views with Channels:

Like any good email campaign, all you have to do is tap into your email list, link out to your testimonial video’s landing page, and include a relevant CTA. Video testimonials allow you to showcase the absolute best of your brand, using real customers as your marketing “actors.”

Stand Out in a Packed Inbox by Including Video in Your Emails

There’s plenty of ways to own the inbox, and one of them is to know what types of videos to send and for what occasion. You should have at least a few ideas after reading this post for what to draft up next!

Once you’ve mastered creating your videos, you can try your hand at eye-catching, interactive thumbnails to really increase your click-through rate and drive visitors to your website.