If you aren’t creating videos to support your sales efforts, you’re missing out on one of the most valuable tools known to attract more prospects, nurture leads better, and create more sales.
The rise in video only continues to grow as demand for it grows. Let’s look at the facts:
- In 2009, Americans started watching more YouTube videos than they conducted Google searches (a BILLION more videos)
- In 2022, TikTok surpassed Google as the most popular search engine
- 82% of all internet traffic is from video
- 72% of B2B buyers say they watch a video while deciding whether to buy
- 82% of businesses are investing more in video
So how do you take advantage of video for sales and marketing purposes? Thankfully over the past few years, video technology has changed a lot. Video is now easier – and cheaper – than ever to create. Here are the basics to get you started.
What is Video Email?
Just about every business uses email marketing. It’s one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, and continues to be an important tool for both marketers and sales teams.
Acquiring an email address of a potential customer is often one of the first big challenges in lead generation, making email marketing even more important. But once you get an email address, the challenges are just beginning. Inbox competition is getting harder. Getting people to open your emails and click through requires a content strategy and clever content tricks, like adding video, to increase engagement.
Video emails are emails you create that feature videos as a way to communicate with your contacts. They can either be:
- Embedded within the email – Where the video plays within the email. Generally not recommended, as the media size would make it hard to send the emails. Only a few email service providers allow videos to play within messages.
- Hosted videos – Where the video lives on a web page or on a video hosting platform (such as YouTube or Vimeo). Within your email you can include a gif of the video (or a thumbnail) and a link back to your landing page.
Video email brings the human element to your communication. A personal message from a person they can see is naturally more engaging than words alone. It’s easier to deliver the right tone, inflection, and emotion better than text alone.
Who Benefits Most from Video Email
If your email contains information helpful to the recipient depending on where they’re at in their buyer journey, then the person who benefits most from video emails is the recipient. Video Email allows for more visuals in your communications. The human brain is especially adept at processing visual information and can respond to visuals faster than other communication materials and retain them better.
If you’re wondering if you and your business could benefit from video email, there’s a very good chance you can. It’s a tremendous sales tool for Whoever is in charge of customer acquisition, outreach and nurturing would benefit from video email for sales purposes. This includes:
- Small business owners
- Business development reps
- Sales development reps
- Account executives
- Sales engineers
Most small businesses, even those who have an in-house marketing team, generally do not have the resources to shoot and edit video. It’s too expensive to hire a video team, and takes too much time for someone in-house to do it. But, tapping into the technology available online makes it practical and affordable for any business of any size to create an impactful video email campaign.
What are the Benefits of Video Email?
If you’re thinking creating video email campaigns may not be worth the learning curve, take a look at the metrics. The return on your time and money is far superior to traditional email blasts.
- Video email gets 3x more responses
- A video thumbnail in an email improves subscriber engagement by nearly 41%
- Just having the word “video” in the subject line can increase open rates by 6%
- Video emails can increase click rates by 65% while reducing unsubscribe rates by 26%
- Adding video content to email can reduce opt-outs by 96%
Video has a magical power to it that increases engagement. People in general – including your prospects – prefer information via video over text, especially if there’s any difficulty in communicating a concept. Any message can be delivered via video to increase engagement, even if it seems like the written word would be good enough. The reason being, it can take more written words than the recipient is willing to read to get your message across. Shorten the text and add a video and voilà – message delivered!
Your competitors are likely still sending out regular email blasts. You can leapfrog over them using video email. Your emails are far more likely to be opened, clicked, watched, and read. Your messages will be easier to retain and remember.
How to Add Video Emails to Your Sales Outreach Efforts
Creating videos that support your sales efforts begins with a solid strategy. A solid strategy starts with understanding who your audience is and what their buyer’s journey looks like. A buyer’s journey is your potential customer’s path to purchasing your product or service.
The three stages to every buyer’s journey:
- Awareness of the problem they’re experiencing
- Consideration of the options available to solve the problem
- Decision of which provider can best provide the solution
Next, consider your current outreach. How many touchpoint opportunities do you have along their buyer journey? This is essentially defining your sales process. Every business has a different sales process, but will likely involve some aspect of the following: prospecting & lead nurturing, converting & closing sales, and customer follow up. Consider your outreach – how you reach out and when you reach out. Then, consider what you offer them at each point in their journey, making sure your message aligns with where they are and how they’re thinking.
Lastly, think of ways to compliment your current email marketing with video. You can build trust and a relationship with potential new customers by tailoring your video email messages to the stage they’re in. Check out our favorite types of sales videos you can use to support your outreach efforts.
Once your video is created, a video sales tool like Magnfi will generate a 3 second gif of your video that plays on a loop. This appears in the email, which will increase your open and engagement rates. Our sales videos are proven to really grab attention! A moving thumbnail image, along with a quick headline, compels your audience to click to see the rest of the video.
With a sales tool like Magnfi, your team does not need any technical skills to make this happen. It’s all in our software. It’s remarkably easy. Once you’ve determined your sales strategy, the creating and sending is the easy part. You can send your video email out to 50 recipients at a time. Then, you can track your progress.
How to Add Video Email into Your Customer Outreach Efforts
Once you’ve converted your leads into new customers, you can continue nurturing your relationship with them via video email. Video email for customer outreach helps retain customers and helps support upsell opportunities. They are a great way to thank them for their business, deliver interesting company news, update them on new products or services, or request the most coveted type of social proof referral – the video customer testimonial.
Testimonials are extremely important for any business. People often read reviews online and customer testimonials on your website before deciding to make contact. But, people also know that a lot of reviews are fake. Video testimonials are so much more real and engaging than a written one. They are much more believable.
Incorporating video testimonial requests as part of your customer outreach efforts helps influence buyer decisions and ultimately drives more sales.
Tips to Optimize Your Email Marketing with Video
Video email marketing is more effective than traditional email marketing, so using video in your email campaigns is essential. If you’re not familiar with creating and sharing videos via email, the majority of your planning may focus on creating high-quality videos. While making sure the video itself is perfect, ensuring all aspects of the email is optimized is equally as important. Here are some tips to follow when creating high-quality sales video emails.
Choose your dedicated contact owner
The person featured in your sales video should be the person who is in direct contact with your prospect. If that person changes throughout the sales cycle, consider a warm up introduction through video. Again, think back on which email goes out when. If contacts are in a general nurture campaign, it may be most effective to hear directly from the company’s owner, founder, and/or CEO who can speak passionately about the pain points and solutions that brought a contact to you through their own research. If contacts are part of a prospect nurture campaign, it would be most effective to hear directly from the sales or business development rep who they will be speaking directly to. Lastly, when leads become customers, they may be passed on to an account executive responsible for customer management and relations. Again, your video will introduce this transition to make the customer feel more comfortable and secure in the way they are being managed throughout your sales process.
Make thumbnails memorable
Magnfi makes creating a video thumbnail easy. The hardest part will be planning your first impression in those 3 important seconds that your gif loops. This gif thumbnail should catch your contact’s eye and make them want to click through for more information. One of our favorite tips is to write down a short message on a whiteboard or plain sheet of paper. Try to personalize the message with your contact’s name if the sales video makes sense to do so. This message can even be a call-to-action, such as Play Me, Steve! For a more generalized approach for a mass email marketing send, a classic play button overlay is still one of the strongest CTA options available.
Add supporting copy and captions
The gif alone in your email will catch eyes, but to make the message compelling, give some thought to the content of your email. Your subject line, preview text, and supporting copy in the body of the email is still important. It doesn’t need to be long – a short amount of copy with context will provide enough info to drive the viewer to click for more information. One of our favorite tips: Add to the subject line to increase open rates.
Go the mile with a landing page
When we first introduced video email, we explained videos within emails could be hosted on video platforms or your website. If you’re able to create a landing page on your website, adding your video will allow for conversions and better engagement tracking which will help attribute video to your bottom line.
Tracking Your Email Marketing Video Success Rates
Through your email client, you’re no stranger to tracking email metrics like open rate and click through rate. In addition to tracking email stats, with Magnfi, you can also track video stats within your dashboard. You can see exactly when people opened your email and how many times they played your video. This insight will help you see what’s working well and what to improve upon. It also lets you know who to send follow-up emails to.
Get Started with Video Email
Fortunately, getting started is very easy, no capital expense involved. Video has become increasingly easier to create thanks to technology. Everyone has video recording available on their smartphone, laptop or desktop.
Magnfi takes this concept even further, enabling you to create high-quality videos with professional production that requires no video editing skills. With Magnfi, you simply record your video from whatever device you want to use and upload it. We take care of the editing, packaging together your recorded clips, logo, call-to-action and music selection. In minutes, you have a professional quality video designed to attract, nurture, and convert customers.
You can try Magnfi’s video email tool with your team for free with a 14-day free trial. We show you how to use the tool, and share with you best practices to continue improving your sales outreach efforts.
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