With the number of email users expected to reach a whopping 4.3 billion by the end of 2023, email marketing campaigns remain one of the most important and effective ways to increase customer engagement and drive targeted traffic to your website. 

Incorporating video into your ecommerce email marketing strategy can further strengthen your email marketing campaign to build engagement, increase brand awareness, and improve click-through rates.

Incorporating the right video content into your emails not only helps engage your subscribers but also encourages them to take the buying action. A study by Forrester also highlights that adding videos in an email marketing campaign can boost your click-through rate by a phenomenal 200-300%.

This post will cover more about video-based email marketing and the top 5 best practices for using videos in your email marketing campaigns.

What Is Video Email Marketing?

Video email marketing refers to the process of adding interactive and engaging videos to marketing emails to widen your audience's reach. Data also suggests that as high as 83% of marketers believe that it is critical to communicate with your audience using video content. 

An increasing number of e-commerce marketers, therefore, are using personalized video email marketing strategies where they embed videos, GIFs, or other static images and send them to users via email where they can play the original video. 

In the realm of digital promotion, video advertising agencies shine as architects of captivating brand stories. They masterfully blend concise messages with elaborate visual narratives, offering marketers a spectrum of creative options. Choosing the right agency becomes a strategic move for brands seeking to infuse burstiness into their campaigns and resonate uniquely with their target audience.

Benefits of Incorporating Videos in Email Marketing

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There are several advantages of incorporating video in your email marketing strategy, including the following:

• Videos help you boost the click-through rates of your emails by making them more appealing to the users. This is especially relevant for e-commerce stores where you can use videos in emails to promote events, show product demos, testimonials, or other social proofs. You can also use a video email strategy to upsell product packages and increase overall conversions.

• Video email marketing is also a great way to increase the visibility and reach of your content. This is mainly because video content is easily shareable on most social platforms to enjoy maximum audience reach

• Using videos in emails also influences buying decisions among users as they help explain the value of a product/service a brand offers in a much better way.

• Videos help build trust and establish a strong bond with both existing and prospective customers. Leveraging video email marketing makes brands more approachable to customers. 

Video Email Marketing Best Practices for E-Commerce

When executing video email marketing campaigns for e-commerce businesses, it's crucial to employ the right strategy through a white label digital marketing agency for optimal results.

To help you navigate this better, here are some video email marketing best practices that you can use:

1. Choose Your Video Type Wisely

There are several different types of videos to consider when choosing the most appropriate one for your email campaign. Some of the most common types that you can choose from include:

• Brand videos

• Event videos

• Product Demo videos

• Live videos

• Educational videos

• Testimonial videos

The need here is to determine the type of video that best fits your brand’s personality, product, or service and make your pick accordingly. 

It is important to remember that some videos have distinct advantages over others. For example, live video engages users better than on-demand types, and more than 80% of people prefer to see a live video rather than a social or blog post. Make a new market research for better results also using a market intelligence platform to facilitate research. 

2. Be Strategic About Embedding Videos in Your Emails

There are several ways you can strategically embed videos in your video marketing strategy, including the following:

• Make sure to add a play button to an image of your video. Interested email subscribers are more likely to click on the video content and go to the actual video either on your website or popular hosting platforms such as YouTube. 

• Create a clickable GIF of the video and directly embed it as an image in the email. Once your users or subscribers click on it, they will be redirected to the video you want to play.

3. Have a Clear CTA

Another important thing to keep in mind here is to have a clear CTA for both your email and video to guide subscribers to take a specific action.

For example, to attract your subscribers to buy your product, use phrases such as Claim Your Offer, "Shop Now," or "Get Yours Today." 

Including a proper CTA in the video itself ensures that viewers understand clearly what to do next, even if they don’t refer back to the email after they finish watching the video. 

4. Create Short, Concise, Compelling Videos

With the attention spans of users getting shorter, marketers need to understand the optimal length of videos for maximum impact. 

Ideally, the initial 15 seconds of any video are crucial, and the entire video length should not be more than two minutes to ensure that your audience watches the video till the end. 

Apart from this, your video should also be completely relevant to the subject line and content of your email and match both the interests and expectations of your audience. 

5. Personalize Your Video Content for Specific Emails

Using personalized video content within specific emails and one-on-one communication is another excellent way to reach out to your audience effortlessly. 

Alternatively, you can repurpose or reuse video content you’ve already made to make it more customized, personal, or relevant for individual users. 

This is also an excellent way to build relationships with your target audience and deliver an exceptional customer experience

6. Consistently Track and Measure Your Video Performance

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Lastly, consistently track and measure how your email video performs and impacts your email marketing goals.

You can use a range of metrics such as open rate, video views, click-through rate, video completion rate, conversion rate, and revenue to evaluate the effectiveness of your video. 

Alternatively, you can use tools such as Google Analytics to track the web traffic and behavior of your subscribers who click on your video.  

Limitations and fallback  

Notwithstanding the promise of video email marketing, it does have the following limitations:

• It can be high-budget.

• Embedding videos in an email is technically complex.

• Load time could be a major hold-up. If the email takes too long to load, it will turn off your subscriber, resulting in a wasted open.

• Apart from Apple Mail and iOS mail, no email client supports videos. 

You can, at best, add an image of the video in the email and then link it to the actual video hosted elsewhere. Now, there is also another fallback, known as faux video. As the name suggests, a faux video mimics video-like movements, creating a simulated video experience for subscribers. It is typically built with the help of animated GIFs. Most importantly, it is supported by most email clients such as:

• Gmail and Gmail App

• Apple Mail

• iOS Mails (iPhone and iPad)

• Outlook (Mac)

• Samsung Mail 

Evidently, you can reach more subscribers with faux video than with HTML5 videos. In addition, faux video is mobile-responsive and you can also use retina images with it. 

We noted that embedding videos in email is technically complex. Ultimately, it comes to this: without a proper technical architecture in place, you couldn’t leverage video email marketing to the hilt. Your best option would be to consult professional email design and coding experts.

In Conclusion

When it comes to e-commerce businesses, there are several strategic ways to use video in your email marketing campaigns. Apart from the best practices mentioned above, you can also A/B test the approach that best fits your required KPIs.

Overall, video email marketing is an excellent way to improve your open rates, increase sea, and create trust and credibility with your customers. 

If you also wish to start using video in your email campaigns, it is best to try some of the best practices we shared above and see how they help boost your e-commerce business results. Apart from this, you can also use free, open-source e-commerce platforms such as OpenCart for online merchants. The platform provides a professional and reliable foundation to build a successful online store within a few simple steps.

Contact us to know more!