How to use Animated Explainer Videos For Boosting Email Open Rates?

Different emails come in the inbox of an individual. To ensure that your email is not deleted and read by the receiver, you have to spice up the email marketing strategy. Read on to know about how to use the animated explainer videos for boosting email open rates.

When you combine video and email, you get a powerhouse duo.

On the one hand, there’s a video. As you probably know by now, it is the most effective type of content out there. Just by looking at the stats over the past few years, you can see that its growth has been exponential. Audiences and marketers alike love video. It’s engaging, fun, and great for increasing conversions.

On the other hand, you have email, an essential channel of communication that keeps going strong, especially in business. Email keeps you connected with your audience, helps you promote your brand, and boosts your business’ reach.

That’s why, when you combine video and email, the results tend to be outstanding. If you do it right, at least!

Throughout this piece, we’ll show you everything you need to know about effectively embedding video in your emails, the advantages of doing so, and even learn how to track who viewed them by using Wistia! Let’s go! 

Why Use Video In Your Email Campaigns?

So, yes, it might be obvious that combining email and video gets you a powerful, effective marketing tool. However, not everyone seems to be aware of it!

That got us thinking… Why? Maybe with all the buzz around other digital promotion channels, like social media, PPC, and the like, most people thought that email marketing was ancient digital history. However, email remains the most popular channel to interact with audiences in a business environment!

Detractors also point to the huge amounts of emails the average person receives each day as one of the strategy’s big flaws, and we agree! Yet this is precisely why you need amazing content that excites your audience into actually open and interacts with your marketing emails!

Using video in your email campaigns can help you stand out and get your prospect’s attention. It also helps with your email conversions, increases your open rates, and boosts your click-through rates by 200-300%. Yeah, it’s THAT big of a difference! 

Another awesome thing about including video in your emails is that you can track who watches them, which can give valuable insights into which recipients are engaging with your content and help you measure the results down to the individual viewer.

We’ll come back to this in a minute, but let’s get started on the “How” side of things first.

Start Off By Setting Goals

It all begins with a simple question: What do you want to achieve with your email?

This may sound basic, but setting a goal is a crucial aspect of email marketing success and it’s the very first thing you should do. Having a clear goal from the get-go will guide your campaign, and make it easier to measure its success.

Essentially, there are just about two paths:

• To make your audience go visit your site to consume content there.
• To have them consume the content within the email.

It’s important to be on the “what-do-you-want-your-subscriber-to-do” frame of mind. Taking this into account will help you define your campaign’s main CTA (call-to-action) – Another key aspect of success.

So, remember: Whether it is to interact with a video embedded within the email itself, or to get them to a website, always have a clear goal from the start.

Making Your Audience Grow

Using video and email together, you increase the chances of delivering entertaining, helpful, and engaging content big time! And you can combine them to not only connect with your existing audience but also to expand your reach and have it grow!

Take this as an example:

You put together an email that has a super awesome animated explainer video linking to your website, then send it to your loyal core audience. A huge percentage of your readers will open it (because they already love your content!) but if the content attached is worth it, they might also share it with friends, coworkers, or even clients.

Through those shares, you’ll get your content in front of the willing eyes of new prospects. If they like what they see, they can subscribe to your emails, learn more about you, and, hopefully, become new clients. Extending your reach and growing your audience!

Email & Video Best Practices From Yours Truly! 

The goal here is to help increase your email open and click-through rates to ultimately build a bigger audience using video. For that, we have some Do’s and Don’ts for you:

• Include the word “video” in the subject line of your email. By doing so, your recipient immediately knows there’s juicy content inside.
• Always choose an inviting and attractive thumbnail for your video. It’s the first impression that matters most!
• Don’t include too many CTAs. Keep it simple and clear.
• Manage video file sizes for a better user experience. Long, heavy videos usually don’t make a good match with email.
• If you want to generate traffic to your site, send your audience to your landing page when they click the video thumbnail on your email. It will give them context and complementary elements to reinforce the on-brand feel.
• If you want your video to play as soon as your subscriber clicks on the play button, add a ? play to the video URL.

Embedding Vs Attaching Video —What’s the Best Way to Go? 

Now that you know how much more engaging and dynamic your email can be when you include video, it’s time to learn how to do it.

There are two ways to include video in your email: You can either have your video play directly in the email or have your subscribers be redirected to your landing page and watch it there.

The first alternative is great for engaging your viewers… as long as people can see the content.

Videos directly embedded on an email’s body require HTML5 compatibility to be displayed. The thing is that HTML5 is only supported by a few email providers. If not supported, subscribers just see a “fallback image”, which is a still picture that looks like the video and links to another page. Or, in the worst-case scenario, a broken image error.

So, before jumping into any decisions, take into account which email provider most of your audience is using, and analyze if it’s worth the tradeoff or not. And hope you liked our article about how animated explainer videos for boosting email open rates. Share your thoughts in the comment section.