A recent Forrester report suggests that including a video element in your email campaigns can raise click-through rates up to 300%.
“…Interviews with marketing executives revealed that using compressed video without sound, with animated gifs, and clickable screen shots of videos can result in click-through rates that are two to three times the usual rate.
Some 9% of marketers are currently experimenting with video in email, and another 21% plan on including video in their email marketing efforts in the next 12 months, according to a July 2008 JupiterResearch/ClickZ survey of 286 email executives…” continue reading
This supports a recent Nielsen Online study confirming that online video remains a popular and growing online activity.
“…Nielsen Online provided overall online video usage data for April 2009, which shows that approximately 119 billion unique viewers watched seven trillion total streams during the month. The numbers reveal that year-over-year, total streams are up 24%, streams per viewer are up 27% and time per viewer is up 58% percent…” continue reading
Of course, embedding video in email is still problematic. Not only does it increase your message weight and affect delivery speeds, but it is often (if not usually) blocked by ISPs and email security systems as are other executable files.
But all is not lost. You can still achieve higher click-through rates by using video screen captures in your message as an image link, which recipients can click on and be brought to the video hosted online. Some email marketers are also experimenting with animated gifs in their messages and using certified video email systems.
Have you used video in your email campaigns yet? What was your experience?
I agree Nick. Video can be used very successfully to get a message across and allows to viewer to engage with that message with minimal effort. It will be interesting to see if embedded solutions for email evolve in time.
I think we are just seeing the beginning of video marketing. People are just more likely to click on a video and watch it than trying to read through text.