Email marketing is an important tool for every small business, generating great ROI and allowing you to communicate with your customers directly. Email can also be accurately segmented and personalized, contributing to lasting customer loyalty.

Using video in your email marketing is even better, massively boosting response rates and customer engagement. As access to fast WiFi increases, emails can include video much more reliably, making it a great addition to your marketing mix.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use video to supercharge your email response rates.

The Marketing Impact of Video in Email

Put simply, video is great for engagement. Videos in email can increase open rates by 19% and boost click through rates by as much as 65%. One of the main reasons for this is that video creates a human connection, and that’s vital for a modern marketing strategy.

It’s the same for every small business and every industry—customers buy brands, not products. In order to create an engaged and loyal customer base, your small business needs to share its brand values. Video makes this easy to accomplish. Along with creating connections, video gives customers the interactive, person-based marketing experience they now crave.

The great thing about video is that it can boost the response rate of all email types, including:

• Welcome emails to new customers through WiFi logins, pop-ups, or POS
• Engagement emails to serve content
• Specific sales emails requiring a CTA (Call to Action).
  
  

Combining the power of video-boosted emails with great customer email data will send your response rates sky-high.

6 Ways Video Can Boost Your Email Response Rates

Here are some great ways to use video to boost your email response rates:

1. Personalizes your emails

Personalization always has better results than dull, generic emails. That’s because it makes customers feel valued and understood. You’re also much more likely to achieve better response rates if you send customers an email offering something they actually want, so segmenting based on quality customer data is essential. Using video to amplify this personalization will improve response rates, providing an extra humanizing effect to persuade and inspire authority.

Video is particularly beneficial in emails where you need action from the customer. For example, a sales promotion or call-to-action asking them to contact you following an initial email capture.

2. Increases trust in your business brand

Email marketing is a perfect way to both contact new customer leads and nurture new email addresses you may have. But it’s always a challenge to achieve immediate trust in your brand over competitors. While social media platforms such as Instagram are important for this, combining great video content with email marketing is an essential tool to increase trust in your business brand and highlight brand values.

As well as ‘selling’ your business, you’ll be able to give your recipient value through video with tips, product reviews, and general information. Your business will appear authoritative and likeable, boosting the likelihood that your customers will act on your CTA.

3. Targets different areas of your sales funnel

Email always has a better response rate with targeted segmentation, and video can boost this effect. Combining customer insight data with video content in an email will let you target specific customer segments that are in different places in your funnel.

For example, for top funnel customers generated through channels such as guest WiFi or ‘contact us’ forms, video content can be sent that gets their attention, piquing their interest to carry on a conversation with your brand and help push them through the funnel.

For customers who are deeper into the funnel, longer and more educational or explainer videos can be sent tailored to their needs and preferences. These customers will already know and align with your brand, so these videos can focus on engagement and loyalty creation.

4. Makes it easy to convey your brand’s personality

While segmenting and targeting are vital in email, it’s also important to share your brand’s personality in your communications. Brand personality and values allow you to stand out from your competitors before your new customers develop a brand relationship with you, so it’s essential to get it right.

Use emails to share attention-grabbing videos that demonstrate what differentiates your business. Include behind-the-scenes clips, moments with employees, and even user-generated content to give your videos some extra content magic. Keeping your brand values and personality central to your marketing will foster engagement and loyalty, so don’t be tempted to skip this.

5. Helps you test, measure, and optimize your email marketing

It’s likely that you’ll see an instant response uplift when you use video in your email marketing. But even better, using video in emails allows you to test, measure, and optimize each and every part of your campaign. You’ll be able to test each element of a video within every segment, giving you the tools to create stellar content that generates stand-out ROI and response.

Along with viewing rates, you’ll be able to test video elements compared with conversion rates and CTA response. All of this data will give you the tools to create insight-optimized emails that work every time, giving your small business the response rates you need to drive profit and engagement.

6. Allows you to drive immediate customer action

Video content in email has the power to drive immediate customer behavior. Embedding a video into your email for your customer to watch immediately isn’t usually the best option for a couple of reasons. Restraints are often put in place by email providers and video playback often isn’t great on mobile.

This actually gives you a great opportunity to drive and inspire immediate action in your customer, moving them out of their inbox and into a direction you provide to move along your sales funnel. Creating a clearly viewed CTA combined with an embedded video thumbnail will guide your customer to a specific landing page.

Conclusion

Put simply, video marketing content in email is a great way to increase email response rates for your business. Along with allowing you to share your brand personality and values in an engaging way, video in email has the power to be personalized and drive immediate action, and it can be actively tested.

Hannah Hambleton is the Content Manager for Beambox, a guest WiFi provider. Hannah writes about marketing technology and trends, giving businesses the tools they need to drive growth and create lasting brand loyalty.