Why you should incorporate video marketing into your email marketing

Josh Bernoff over at the Groundswell blog has defined email marketing as “…email that is sent to a carefully chosen group of people with the expectation of forming or extending a relationship.”

This is a general definition, but it’s a useful one. Relationship-building should be your first concern when promoting your brand identity and/or products through an email newsletter or blast-out.

Fortunately, there’s a veritable wealth of manuals out there about how to write better email outreach, as well as how to time and space out your send-outs for better open rates and more clickthroughs. That said, it’s clear that more research can and should be done about the separate issue of email design — i.e., the ways in which email marketing messages are best designed and packaged outside of brute content considerations. This is where video marketing can play an important role.

Say your engineering team has rolled out a path-breaking innovation that will put all others to shame. And say, in turn, that your marketing team has done a great job drafting an alluring email announcement about your innovation.

By most accounts, you’re all set. All of your ducks are in a row. But then you realize: Your big, important email announcement looks plain. Since you’ve got a lot of new features to describe, you’ve used a heavy amount of text. Ultimately, it all amounts to something that doesn’t catch the eye. And now you wonder: Will busy people read this? Will they invest their scarce time reading this email?

Video can help mitigate or else overcome the challenge of engaging quick-trigger email readers. Instead of promoting your brand through blocks of text, you might consider putting a video player thumbnail right within the body of your next message. Here’s another way to see this. If the winner of the most recent U.S. presidential election leaned heavily on this email-plus-video tactic, isn’t this a sign that plain text, more often than not, just won’t cut it?

The key consideration here is that you have every reason to capture someone’s attention quickly. Chances are, if you don’t acquire interest immediately, readers will simply delete or archive your message and move on.

If anything, incorporating video into your email marketing will give your audiences a friendly option: by linking them to a video containing your main marketing messages, you’re signaling to your audiences that you respect their time and preferences enough to offer them a viewing option in addition to a reading option. Such thoughtfulness should strengthen your email marketing efforts over both the short and long term.

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