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:

• Video in email guide
• Collect more emails in video
• Technical tip for email and video

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:

• How to turn your videos into GIFs (Vimeo)
• GIPHY Capture. The GIF Make‪r‬ (Mac App Store)

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!

by Jonathan March 26, 2021 in In-Depth

Growing your mailing list is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. Consider the following statistics:

• There are over 3.9 billion daily active email users world-wide
• The average click-through rate for email campaigns is 2-4%, compared to just 0.9% for Facebook (or 0.4% for LinkedIn)
• 65% of U.S. consumers have made a purchase based on a message they received via email, compared to just 20% via Facebook or 6% via Twitter (source)

As you make plans for 2021, email marketing and growing your list should be a top priority! In this blog post, we discuss a highly effective method you can use to attract new subscribers to your mailing list: lead magnets.

What’s a Lead Magnet?

Simply put, a lead magnet is an attractive piece of content or valuable item that you offer visitors to your website in exchange for them handing over their name and email address. For example, a lead magnet could be an e-book or digital guide in an area of your expertise, access to a webinar, or a template or resource.

 The good folks over at The Balance put together a great explainer with excellent ideas and examples of lead magnets:

How Do I Create a Lead Magnet in Direct Mail?

The first step is creating a subscribe form to capture your new leads (choose Addresses > New Subscribe Form… from the menu bar at the top of your screen). Here’s an example.

The next step is creating the message that will be sent to your new leads. The message should contain the digital content or item that was promised in exchange for signing up. For example, you could include a link to the item or include it directly as an attachment.

The next step is creating an autoresponder that will automatically send your message to anyone that signs up for your list. This help article explains how to do that.

Now your lead magnet is set up. The final step is simply sharing the link to your lead magnet (i.e. the sign-up form you created). Here are some ideas:

• Add a link from your website to your lead magnet
• Embed the form directly on your website (or WordPress blog)
• Add a button to your business Facebook page
• Pin a tweet with the link to the top of your Twitter feed
• Promote your lead magnet on social media
• Add the lead magnet link to your email signature

Year-in, year-out email marketing continues to provide the best return on your marketing dollars. As you make plans for growth in 2021, be sure to focus on your mailing list and consider using a lead magnet to boost your subscriber count.

If you have any questions about setting up a lead magnet, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team!

by Jonathan January 14, 2021 in In-Depth

One of the traditional ways to measure the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign is to look at open and click-through rates. In this blog post, however, we take a look at another performance measurement that you might not have considered before: conversion rate.

What is a conversion rate?

When we talk here about conversion rates, we are talking about what percentage of your email subscribers have taken some kind of action that (1) can be tracked and (2) goes beyond opening or clicking a link in your email. Common examples might include:

• what percentage of your email subscribers purchased something from your website, or
• filled out a form or survey on your website, or
• downloaded something from your website, or
• scheduled an appointment with you, or
• signed up for your event online

When one of those actions takes place, we say that the person has converted. You may have noticed that the above examples are all actions that take place on your website. If you use a website analytics service (like Google Analytics) you can collect data on how many of your visitors convert, and learn what brought those visitors to your site. By combining Direct Mail’s email reporting with your website analytics, you can find out how effective your email campaigns are at driving conversions on your website—in other words, what your email campaign’s conversion rate is.

Using Google Analytics

The rest of this blog will make two assumptions:

1. You are using Google Analytics on your website
2. You have already set up one or more conversion “goals” on your website that you’d like Google Analytics to track

If you haven’t done those things yet, we recommend taking a look at one of these great Intro to Google Analytics courses:

• Google Analytics for Beginners by Google
• The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics by Moz

Tagging your campaigns

Let’s say one of your email campaign goals is to get subscribers to click on a link in your email that takes them to your website. Once they’ve landed on your website, one of your goals may be for them to take an action that will convert them into a paying customer (or a repeat customer). Google Analytics can show you what percentage of your website visitors have converted, and, with an extra 5 seconds of work on your part, it can also show you which email campaigns those website visitors came from.

To get these extra insights, you need to tell Direct Mail to “tag” the links in your email campaign. This is done by checking the “Tag for Google Analytics” checkbox that appears when you send a campaign. You can also optionally enter a custom campaign name (e.g. “Fall 2018”). If you do not enter a campaign name, it defaults to the subject line of your message. The campaign name will be shown in Google Analytics—it is not visible to your recipients.

When you send your message, Direct Mail appends some extra information to the links in your email. When someone clicks a link in your email, this extra information tells Google Analytics that the visitor came from your email campaign. This is what allows Google Analytics to attribute that visitor’s conversion (if they convert) to your email campaign.

Viewing the results in Google Analytics

After you have sent your email campaign, you can view open and click reports in Direct Mail like normal. To access the extra Google Analytics conversion data, you’ll want to sign in to your Google Analytics account in your browser.

Once you’ve signed in, click on the “Acquisition” link on the left-hand side, then click “Campaigns”, then click “All Campaigns”

You will see a list of all of the campaigns that Google Analytics is tracking. These campaigns include not only email campaigns sent by Direct Mail, but also other ad campaigns that you may be running to drive traffic to your site (like Google AdWords, Facebook ads, etc.). Find and click on the email campaign that you sent with Direct Mail—remember to look for the “campaign name” that you used above when clicking the “Tag for Google Analytics” button.

Viewing the columns left-to-right, you can see the metrics that Google Analytics is tracking: number of users, bounce rate, session duration, etc. The right-most group of columns may be the most interesting. These columns show the performance for the selected goal.

In this screenshot, we can see that the “Fall 2018” campaign resulted in 27 conversions for “Goal 1: Purchase”. This means that 27 people who received my “Fall 2018” email campaign clicked a link in the email and eventually went on to purchase something from my website—either right away or several days later. I originally sent this email campaign to 950 subscribers, so that makes my conversion rate 27 ÷ 950 = 2.8%. Nice!

If you want to see the combined conversion rate for all of your Direct Mail campaigns (instead of just one of them), click on “Acquisition”, then “Campaigns”, then “All Campaigns”, then click on “Source”. A list of all the campaign sources will appear—look for the one labeled “directmailmac”.

Conclusion

Open and click-through rates are not the only way to track campaign performance. Taking a look at conversion rates can yield additional insight. Direct Mail’s “Tag for Google Analytics” feature can help you uncover additional insights into how effective your campaigns are at converting leads into customers. If you have any questions about anything discussed in this blog post, or want to give feedback, please let us know!

by Jonathan November 15, 2018 in In-Depth

Everyone knows that the bigger their email list, the better, but when it comes to email marketing, the quality of that list is just as important. What do we mean by quality? Engagement. The best mailing lists are filled with subscribers that open and act on the emails that they receive. Our friends at Return Path recently compiled a list of tips for building a larger, more engaged email list. You can check out the entire guide here, but we’ve highlighted some of our favorite tips below.

Before we begin, don’t forget that Direct Mail makes managing your email list sign-up process easy! You can create a subscribe form in Direct Mail, connect it to your website or Facebook page, and even integrate it into the other services and apps your company already uses.

Experience Your Customer’s Point of View

Take a step back and view your mailing list sign-up process through the eyes of your customers. For example:

• Is your email list sign-up form easy to find locate on your website?
• What about on a mobile device?
• Have you clearly spelled out the benefits to signing up for your list?
• Have you set the right expectations for how frequently you will email them?
• Have you removed as much friction from the process as possible? For example, if you have a lot of required fields on your subscribe form, consider making some of them optional.

Get Your Relationship Started on the Right Foot

What do your subscribers see after they’ve signed up for your list? Creating a custom “thanks for subscribing” page or a welcome email can help get the relationship started off on the right foot. See this help article for how to configure Direct Mail to send a welcome email to your new subscribers. Or click here to learn how to set up a custom web page that new subscribers will see after they sign up.

Also, it’s great to entice new subscribers with promises of special discounts, exclusive content, early access, etc.—just be sure you follow through. Be sure that your email newsletter delivers on any promises you may have made during the sign-up process.

Promote Your List

Don’t be satisfied to let your sign-up form hide away in the footer of your website. There are lots of places you can promote your mailing list:

• Make signing up for your list part of your online store. You can use our Zapier integration to connect Direct Mail to Shopify, Magento, Gumroad, and other online stores. Check our API for building custom integrations.
• Do you send out email receipts or other transactional email? Consider including a link to your email list sign-up form in those emails, too!
• Include an email sign-up form on your Facebook page. Direct Mail makes it easy.
• If you have a physical retail location, use our iOS app to turn any iPad into a email list sign-up kiosk.

Leverage Social Media

You can give your email list a boost by promoting it from other social media channels that you may already operate. For example:

• On occasion, promote the benefits of your email list to your followers on Facebook or Twitter and include a link to sign up
• Purchase a “promoted tweet” that advertises the benefits of your email list and includes a sign-up call-to-action button
• Annotate your YouTube videos so that viewers can click-through to your website or email list sign-up form
• Purchase a sponsored post on Instagram that entices your followers to sign up

Here We Grow!

If you found some of the above tips useful, we encourage you to check out Return Path’s full guide of 50+ tips at this link. These suggestions can help you grow the size of your email list and improve subscriber engagement, building the foundation for a powerful email marketing channel. If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch and tell us what you think. We love to hear from you!

by Jonathan May 10, 2016 in In-Depth