Digital marketing is a challenge faced by every business, organization, and independent professional in the modern world. These days, if you have your own website, you’re probably also manicuring your SEO, building a social media presence, and running a mailing list. The current challenge appears to be honing and optimizing the tools available or developing new techniques that will become the cutting edge. One of the ways to do this is by turning a tool that everyone is familiar with to new and engaging use with the customers. Videos are incredibly popular right now as a form of inbound marketing. But what about using them for your outbound email campaigns?
Emails with videos stand out and catch attention. In fact, an email containing a video has a three times higher likelihood of being answered. Video is an incredibly powerful form of marketing in every other digital platform and shows every sign of being just as effective in spicing up your email content.
A Picture is Worth 1000 Words
Every brand handles word count differently. Some companies are known for being brief and very to the point while others are more likely to write several page updates every month for their subscribed readers and regular customers. You might not realize how much this style is shaping your audience. Some people like reading long engaging explanations while others like short easy to follow instructions even on the exact same subject. A video, on the other hand, goes through a completely different entry into the brain. Rather than accessing their preference for reading, which varies pretty widely from person to person, a video is easy to take in and doesn’t even require full eye contact if they are also multi-tasking.
Through a video, those who tend toward brevity can convey more information through their actions. Companies that tend toward long articles can instead compress all those words into a few short minutes or even seconds of show-and-tell video. This can make your newsletters much more accessible and give your readers an option to read, watch, or both.
Some People are Audio Learners
Along the same lines, not everyone prefers to absorb information in the same ways. While most online activity is in text, many people are much more comfortable learning and thinking through audible media instead or by seeing it displayed. Videos can provide for two more of the primary learning types found in our populations. Audio learners enjoy listening more than reading and tend to remember things better if they’ve heard them said aloud. Visual learners, on the other hand, need to see how things are done because written or spoken instructions don’t make sense to them without being able to see the example.
When you incorporate video into your email campaigns, you are effectively broadening your receptive audience by making it easier for non-reading learners to enjoy the content you’ve put together.
Videos Peak Curiosity
It should also be noted that while videos in email has been possible for a while, the tactic is widely ignored or unnoticed by most of today’s companies. People don’t expect to get videos in their email and the pure surprise factor will serve to catch their attention. However, this isn’t just some attention-grabbing image trick. Unlike a static image, a video holds promise of more than just what can be seen when the email is opened. With an intriguing title and a great thumbnail, you can use the natural human curiosity to find out more to peak the curiosity of your email recipients. They’ll just want to hit play. At that point, it’s up to your video design and content quality to delight and engage.
Show Off Your Creativity
Videos are also a fantastic opportunity to show your audience a little brand personality beyond the smooth corporate outer shell. Those who are already on your mailing list are more likely to enjoy a taste of your real company culture and sense of humor. Get quirky and invite your customers in on industry jokes you can all share together. The marketing team might take this chance to get creative by mixing up the kind of content, format, and style they use. Just because interviews and workshop how-to videos are the leading content types doesn’t stop you from mixing it up with original video designs just for your audience.
Your marketing team might have a brilliant idea on how to make fun videos with animated video content, well-designed explainer or how-to videos, interesting narrated activity, or even entertaining puppets depending on what fits your brand and campaign content. Use the knowledge you already have about your target audience to determine what neat and less seen techniques for quick video production would most delight and engage them. Anything you can put on video from green screen news reports to talking dogs is theoretically possible.
Humanizing Your Brand Through Video
Of course, when you do put people on camera you can create a distinct effect. Most people think of companies and brands as big impersonal organizations but that’s often very far from the truth. In response to the shifting culture, companies are becoming much more personal. Especially here in the age of small businesses and teams that form their own freelance agencies. Show your audience that you’re more than a logo and product by putting real employee faces in front of the camera.
This can be in the form of an interview-style video, selecting employee hosts of a video series, or even just bringing a camera to catch a few office shenanigans during break time. Try not to worry about dressing up for the camera, being genuine is a great approach for humanizing your office. You can focus on a montage of employee interviews or develop the audience’s connection with one or two hosts.
Sending Personalized Video Emails
Of course, summarizing a newsletter isn’t the only way video emails can further engage your customers. Depending on the occasion and the technology you have on hand, it is entirely possible to customize your video content directly to each customer. With a clever use of substitution, cinematography, and targeting you can make videos and segments of videos recorded for thousands of people seem like they were made just to speak to each individual recipient. This is a similar technique to writing newsletters that appeal to each reader sitting alone in their office, even if the letter is received by thousands.
Alternately, you could 100% personalize the videos if you decided to innovate a method of automating their generation. Modern voice assistant software is advanced enough to read a programmatically personalized script. Combined with animated or somewhat less specific visual elements, you could theoretically make highly personalized videos that wrote, recorded, and sent themselves at trigger events like birthday wishes or 6-month checkups. If your company specialized in AI or cutting-edge technology, this could be a fun way to show that off.
Building a One-on-One Relationship With Customers
Back in the realms of what is possible today, there is one final email video method we’re going to talk about. The possibility of building something that feels like a one-on-one relationship with the customers. Using slightly personalized videos (no AI required) and a well-written character, you could build the feelings of friendship with customers through nothing more complicated than a series of emailed videos. Consider the relatively new Progressive insurance spokesperson, Flo. She is the perfect customer service representative, always enthusiastic, ready to help, and just a little bit quirky. That quirkiness makes her seem more human and the down-to-earth, the way she’s written makes her seem like a friend.
You can use something like the same technique to build a character to talk to your customers in each email. Build someone who represents the ideal person your customers want to talk to in the industry, but not necessarily a customer service rep. If your industry has to do with vehicles, consider a mechanic character who can give customers the real no-BS truth about their cars or another industry-matched personality your customers will relate to.
To learn more about how to improve your marketing strategies, give us a call at 661-702-1310.
