March 2021

Enhance Your Email Marketing With Video

Online video is ubiquitous these days. Social media, advertising, and entertainment platforms are all moving to focus on video. What about email?

One of the most common questions we have received lately is how to integrate video into marketing emails. In this blog post, we’ll share ideas on how you can using video to enhance your email marketing efforts, and show you how easy Direct Mail makes it to add videos to your emails.

Grow Your Lists, Increase Engagement

For email marketers, the name of the game is engagement: how can we increase the number of people who sign up for, read, and click through our emails? Given our ever-shrinking attention spans, video can be an effective way to increase engagement with your emails:

  • Video marketing company Wistia ran a number of tests and found that including video thumbnails in marketing emails yielded a 22% lift in clicks.
  • Video platform Vimeo has tools you can use to collect email addresses from the folks who watch your videos. Videos can be great lead magnets.

We’re not affiliated with Wistia, but they do have a number of other guides you may find helpful:

How to Insert Video Into Your Email

Direct Mail makes it super easy to add video content to your email, but first you need to make sure that your video has been uploaded to a video platform. YouTube and Vimeo are both popular choices and are integrated with Direct Mail. After you’ve uploaded your video, open Direct Mail, click the “Insert Content” button, choose “Video”, and click the spot in your email where you’d like place the video.

Next, paste in the URL to your video. Direct Mail will automatically grab a thumbnail of the video and insert it into your email. You can optionally choose the style of play button that Direct Mail overlays on top of the thumbnail.

When your recipients click on the thumbnail, their video will open in YouTube or Vimeo and automatically start playing.

Can I Play the Video Directly Inside the Email?

Unfortunately, no popular email app supports playing video from YouTube or Vimeo directly in the body of the email. If this ever changes, you can be sure that Direct Mail will support this feature! Until then, the video thumbnail + play button combination should be well understood by your recipients.

If including some motion in the email itself is critical to your design goals, you can consider creating an animated GIF of a few frames of your video. The GIF can then be inserted into your email with a link to watch the rest. Here are a couple resources to help you with that process:

Be careful with this approach, as even short animated GIFs can end up taking a super long time to download. Just watch that the size of your image file doesn’t exceed a few megabytes.

Conclusion

Video content has always been popular, and the story is no different in our online world. Using video to enhance your email marketing efforts can yield a larger subscriber list and increased engagement. Direct Mail’s built-in template editor makes it easy to spruce up your emails with video content, too.

Want more info on combining video with your email marketing? Have a question about something else? Please reach out to our support team today!

Customer Spotlight: Christian Clauwers

One of many awe-inspiring photos taken by Direct Mail user Christian Clauwers

Thank you to all our amazing users who replied to our customer spotlight request. It’s been great to learn more about so many exciting businesses, and hear how many of you have powered through the challenges of the past year. We look forward to sharing many more of these spotlights in the coming months!

Meet Christian Clauwers

We want to shine the spotlight this month on Christian Clauwers, an explorer and super-talented fine arts photographer from Belgium.

My name is Christian Clauwers. As an explorer / photographer, my work focuses on the interaction between man and nature (biodiversity, rising sea levels, etc.), with the oceans and polar regions as themes…This amazing software helps me to invite people to my exhibitions, to spread the word about my work, and to manage my international clientele.

We’re thrilled that Direct Mail is helping Christian share his talents and grow his business. You can see more of his work at https://www.clauwers.com.

It’s not too late to submit your organization to be included in our future social posts and newsletters! Just write us a few sentences about your business and how you are using Direct Mail to help achieve your goals. Please include a contact name, email, and phone number of who we can reach out to for more details. Email us today!