3 Steps for Leveraging Explainer Videos with Sales Emails

After your explainer video, or any other kind of marketing video, is made, it needs to get maximum exposure. Fresh, new clients are great for you because they mean that your company is reaching new groups of customers.

But the exposure you get should not be limited to new prospects. Your previous and repeat customers should also hear about your new video.

Existing customers are important to keep around, because they already know your value and quality. Once they know that you deliver for them, they will gladly stick around with you and even pay more.

You’re probably familiar with the value of explainer videos in marketing by now. But did you know that using videos in your emails can increase click-through rates by 100%?

The study by MediaPost is in line with a survey by MarketingProfs that shows 76% of marketers said campaigns that integrated video and email generated higher click-through rates.

Unfortunately, embedding video in an email is not an easy task. Aside from the technical skills required to embed a media player to an email, not all email clients support in-app video playing.

Most email clients also strip clean embed codes for security reasons, which results in an ugly-looking email and broken video link. Here’s a quick graphic by Vidyard about email clients and their support for in-app video playing.

However, there’s an easy way you can use to email to leverage your explainer videos without actually having to embed the full video. In addition to speeding up your email’s load speed, you won’t lose the interest of your email contacts that use Outlook and Android.

Step 1: Create an intriguing thumbnail for your video.

• Pick an interesting frame from your video. For explainer videos, you should use a frame that shows the style of a video. That means the frame shows characters, objects, and the product’s name.
• The more engaging and relevant it is, the more likely it is to attract people’s curiosity to click.
• Resize the image using a simple editing tool. Photoshop Express or Paint should do the job. Reducing the image size to the smallest size possible is important for helping the image load faster.
• Add a new layer for the play button to add the information that a video is behind that image. Here’s a quick example:

Step 2: Set up a landing page for the video.

Even though it’s the most popular video hosting site, you should avoid hosting your explainer video on a 3rd party site like YouTube. You want to drive traffic to your website where viewers can contact you more easily.

Sending people to YouTube is risky because they’ll likely get distracted by other content and forget why they were there in the first place.

If for some reason you really want to use YouTube, we have a blog post that talks in-depth about tips and tricks for creating a killer YouTube video thumbnail. Check it out here: YouTube thumbnail tips.

Here are a few pointers for setting up your explainer video’s landing page:

• Set up a page just for your explainer video. The design should focus on the video player.
• Embed the video and use keyword-heavy content to support its visibility on search engines.
• Use the same thumbnail that you used on the email.

Step 3: Email away!

After you make sure that you have the landing page ready and the email is good to go, it’s time to send it out.

• Using email marketing tools like MailChimp, write an email template and insert the thumbnail you created in step one. While you’re at it, make sure that your greetings don’t look automated.
• Link the image to your landing page. Preferably, the link should open in a new tab so that readers can reply to your email after they check out the explainer video.
• If you have the time to spend, use multiple variations of email subjects, thumbnails, and email copy. This will allow you to do split testing to see which one works best.

Various Tips to Use

• Try using the words “sale,” “new,” “video,” and “free” in the subject line. These words are known to help increase email open rates.
• The call to action (CTA) is very important for your video. Use a clear CTA since the video’s primary function is to encourage viewers to make certain decision or take specific action.
• Do not set your video up for autoplay.
• Write your email using a personable tone, and preferably send it from an email with a name in it (e.g: [email protected] instead of [email protected]).

Takeaway

Embedding your explainer video (or any kind of video, for that matter) in your email campaign is quite risky since not all email clients support video playing, not to mention that most of the time, embed codes are stripped clean from emails.

You can easily work your way around this by attaching a static image that links to the video instead of embedding the entire video. There are clear benefits to this method:

• The load speed of your email is much faster since it doesn’t have to load a video player and its content.
• You can pick and customize the most interesting thumbnail possible for your video.
• It gives a better click-through rate compared to an in-line link to the video.

I hope this article help you get the most of your awesome explainer videos!