6 Actionable Tips for Improving Emails with Video

Email is still one of the most effective ways for marketers to reach their audiences. Adding video into the mix can improve open and click-through rates and encourage deeper engagement with your content.

We teamed up with the folks at Keap — a software company that offers a CRM and marketing automation platform geared toward small businesses — to offer you six tactics that you can start using to better engage your audience with video and email.

1.) Show off your personality

Video is the best tool for showing your customers who you really are. Don’t be afraid to loosen up and let your personality shine. This doesn’t mean that you have to be silly or strange. It simply means that you just have to be you.

If you’re an in-house video producer trying to get your coworkers to deliver authentic takes, check out some of these tried-and-true tips for directing non-actors. If you’re just starting out with using video for your business, remember that a well-thought-out script, a smile, and some quality lights can go a long way.

Create a clickable thumbnail

When it comes to using video in email, video thumbnails serve as the gateway or invitation to your video content. Let’s be honest – we all know that people judge books by their covers all the time. Similarly, people judge videos by their thumbnails.

Make sure to customize your video thumbnails to boost your click-through rates. Even something as simple as a friendly human waving is more enticing than a blurry office scene or overlaid text on a graph.

Here at Wistia, we’re passionate about helping our customers use video to better market their business. With our Thumbnail Editor, you can add text or use a looping video to take that brand touch to the next level!

2.) Try using a GIF

Using custom GIFs to tease video content is also a brilliant strategy for enticing your recipients to click.

Creating a GIF from a video is not as complicated as it may sound. If you haven’t created GIFs from your videos before, you can use apps like GIF Brewery to get up and running quickly.

Once you create your GIF, you can add it to any email, link it to a blog post or landing page, and watch that click-through rate skyrocket. We’d hypothesize that a dynamic preview of what’s to come will perform better than a static image in an email, but you’ll have to run some tests with your own audience to find out.

3.) Create a series of videos

If you’ve got content that could work well as a video series, try integrating it into an email campaign. Email courses and campaigns can benefit from this approach, especially if each piece of video content points to the next one. It’s like a suspenseful Netflix drama, except with marketing emails.

Because you can track who clicks on what video and how much of each video they watch, you can quickly assess which of your leads are most interested in your content. Plus, if you’re using a marketing automation platform, you can use video-centric campaigns like this to efficiently qualify leads.

With Wistia, we’ve made it super easy to showcase your video content in a sleek and binge-worthy way with our product feature called Channels. Instead of creating an email marketing campaign with several emails, you can upload all of your videos to a Wistia Channel, and link directly to your Channel in one email. Your videos will appear in a Netflix-style format when you embed a Channel to your website.

Additionally, you can collect subscribers from your Channel, easily sync your subscribers to your marketing automation platform or CRM for better lead tracking, and schedule email notifications when you publish new videos.

4.) A/B test [VIDEO] in the subject line

This sounds simple because it is. Once you’ve created an email that includes a video thumbnail, try testing out two subject lines – one that includes “[VIDEO]” and one that doesn’t.

A. How to direct non-actors [VIDEO]
B. How to direct non-actors

Track their respective performances, and learn whether or not your audience is more apt to open an email that includes a video. Sometimes it pays to be explicit.

5.) Draw attention to videos with emojis

Subtle uses of emojis in subject lines or body copy of your email can also help draw attention to your content. Just be aware that emoji render differently in different environments.

6.) Produce videos for specific segments

If video is already baked into your content strategy, you’re probably rolling out videos on a consistent basis. If this is the case, you should consider creating videos catered toward different segments. While this approach requires more time and energy to execute, producing a video with a specific segment in mind will make the content more relevant and personalized to your viewers.