By now, most customers expect the businesses they work with to send them periodic email newsletters and special offers. But these days, customers are demanding more from their favorite brands; they want to see video content in the emails they receive.
Why have consumer expectations changed? And what can modern businesses do to evolve and meet these new consumer expectations?
Why Consumers Expect More Videos
There are several reasons why consumers are expecting more from the emails they receive.
- Email abundance and burnout. The average office workers gets about 121 emails every day – and as you might guess, many of these emails are promotional in nature. People receive even more emails in their personal accounts. With so many emails coming and going, it's natural for traditional emails to become buried and hardly noticeable. For someone to notice a marketing email, he needs to have something unique and different about it.
- Apparent advantages of videos. People are also starting to realize just how advantageous it is to watch a video rather than reading text. Human beings process visual information much faster and more efficiently than they can process textual information, so you can absorb more from a 30-second video then you can from a few paragraphs of written explanation. Additionally, videos offer both visual and auditory information, giving you a truly multimedia experience when you engage with one.
- Video content across multiple channels. Videos are becoming more popular in almost every medium. Classic social media platforms have evolved to encourage more users to create, post, and engage with videos, And new social media platforms have emerged to give users a more enriching video sharing experience. In some ways, video interaction has become the new normal for people in the digital world.
- Mobile experiences. Roughly 55 percent of all web traffic, globally, is on mobile devices. Over the past several years, mobile devices have eclipsed laptops and traditional devices in terms of total traffic and user interaction. Because text can be hard to read on mobile devices and videos are easily accessible, this has driven consumers to favor videos even more.
- Abundant internet access. It also helps that people have more access to the Internet and faster speeds than ever before. The majority of Americans have a high speed internet connection at home, and if they can't get that, they may have reasonable internet access through their phone plan, at a workplace, or at a local library. Faster speeds in greater abundance mean that more people can watch videos easily.
- Competition and baseline expectations. Brands have flocked to video in an effort to reach their audience more effectively. Accordingly, consumers are seeing an increasing number of emails that contain embedded videos in their inboxes. Because of this, video marketing emails are evolving to become a kind of new normal – and traditional text emails seem obsolete by comparison.
The Value of Embedding Videos in Emails
It's not just about consumer expectations. Embedding videos in your emails gives you a ton of advantages.
- Creative flexibility and versatility. Videos offer a lot of creative flexibility. You can film a person providing dialogue, you can create your own motion graphics, and you can radically change a viewer's experience with the inclusion of different types of sound and music. Whatever emotions you want to convey or whatever actions you want to drive, you can accomplish it with the right video.
- Immediate engagement. You can write paragraphs of persuasive and compelling text, but there's no guarantee your recipients are going to read it. Offering a video is a much faster way to get that engagement. Users simply have to click a button and they'll immediately see what you want to show them.
- Concise communication. Videos are one of the most concise mediums you can use to convey information. You can use infographics, photos, personal interaction, background text, and audio tracks in coordination with each other to demonstrate complex ideas in under a minute. This allows you to connect with audiences faster and make sure that none of your information gets lost in translation. If your brand has a lot of information to communicate, there's almost no other option.
- Replays and ongoing interaction. What happens if one of your audience members misses something earlier in the video? If you're using the right tools, all you have to do is replay the video from the beginning. Embedded videos in email are much more conducive to ongoing interaction. They’re also easy to share, giving your most loyal customers an opportunity to promote your brand on your behalf.
- Personalization opportunities. Your email videos also have the potential to be personalized. With the right software, you can personalize the greeting, include the person’s name throughout the video, and even provide specific details relevant to this person's experience with your brand. Personalized emails tend to perform much better in lead generation and marketing campaigns, so it’s worth the extra effort.
- Measurement and analysis. Finally, including videos in your emails grants you more opportunities to measure and analyze your results – and more opportunities for experimentation. You can measure the percentage of your recipients who start the video and compare it to the percentage of recipients who watch the whole thing; not only will you learn more about your audience’s needs and behaviors, but you’ll also get crucial engagement metrics you can use to make your videos better in the future.
Getting Started With Videos in Email
If you have any kind of email marketing strategy, whether you are interested in generating leads or just improving customer loyalty in your existing customer base, it's important to start using videos as part of your content development. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to get started with embedded email videos thanks to modern tools and technologies.
At Viewed Video, we offer intuitive and accessible tools that allow you to create and embed personalized videos in your email campaigns. Even better, it's free to get started, so take 30 seconds and sign up for a free account today!
