How many times have you heard someone moan that they have a short attention span? And how often do you find yourself scrolling through content mindlessly without taking anything in? Our constantly connected world means that we are presented with so much visual and textual data per day, and there is always the option to divert to something else. Commanding someone’s attention has become a huge challenge for brands and it’s easy for your message to get lost when you’re competing with many others trying to achieve the same goal. There are ways that you can boost your chances of engagement and increase email conversion though, one of which being video.
There are many reasons why you should include video content in your marketing strategy. Using video content in email can increase your click-through rate by up to 300% and even reduce your unsubscribe rate by 75% .
Some of the core benefits include:
- They are more likely to be remembered
- Our brains process them 60,000 times faster than text
- They engage visual learners
- They are better at maintaining focus/attention
- Visual memory is stored in a different part of the brain than text
So now you know that video is a great content tool to use, here’s how you can really capitalise on it:
1. Greet them with a smiley face
People are coded to respond better to human faces than text and naturally gravitate towards a person particularly a smiling face and eye contact
2. Cater to all
Include a link in case the email client does not support embedded videos – you could do this by hyperlinking a thumbnail that navigates users to an external landing page which has the added benefit of increasing click through traffic.
3. Keep it short and sweet
Viewers get bored easily and tend to drop off so make sure its immediately entertaining and stick to a run time of under one minute.
4. Test it!
Consider autoplay vs. click-to-play. Autoplay could be frustrating for recipients that are not in an appropriate environment to watch a video and could cause them to exit the email before taking anything in.
5. Be mobile-friendly
Consider whether people may be watching it on the move without sound. E.g. if it is a video demo consider adding subtitles to the mobile version
6. Encourage action
Prompt the viewer to do something by adding a call to action either at strategic times during the video, at the end, or having one permanently visible. Bear in mind that leaving it to the end risks reducing the amount of people that see it.
7. Capture your audience early
Make sure the video is towards the top of the email and doesn’t get lost at the bottom. It is likely that at least some of the email recipients will not scroll all the way down on an email and therefore could miss the video entirely.
8. Let your recipients know there is a video inside!
Research has found that including the word ‘video’ in the email subject line increases open rates by 19% and click-through rates by 65%
The evidence is clear: video is a great tool to have under your belt if you are looking to increase email conversion rates and really engage your viewers. Consider the tips above when planning your next campaign.
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