If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that I am a proponent of using video in email. In the past I have written about how non-profits can use video in email to increase donations and how you can greatly increase your click through rates by including video in your email marketing strategy. I’m a bit of a tech geek so its always been easy for me, create a thumbnail image that “looks” like a video will play and link to the video on a landing page. A simple formula. However having the right tools to edit that thumbnail image has always been a bit of a hurdle for the less technically savvy to get videos integrated into their email design. Thankfully Constant Contact has come up with a very simple and intuitive solution to solve this problem.

They have added a feature so you can very easily add a video link that will automatically generate and insert a video player thumbnail image into an email template. To begin, open an email layout. I recommend you select a block near the top of your email, if the video player appears within their email preview window, they’ll be more likely to open the email or click the link directly within the email window. Within a block on the email, place your cursor where you want the video image link to appear. Then click “Video Link” button that is under the insert menu on the left side (see below).

 

When the new window opens all you have to do is copy and paste the URL link for a specific video on YouTube, Vimeo, Goldmail or Blip.TV. Then click the “Create Image” button. This will automatically pull the thumbnail image for the video you selected into your email template. If you need it larger or smaller you can utilize the slider function to resize the image so it visually fits the block within your email template as you’d like it to appear.

 

You can also optionally change the title if you are segmenting your list and you want the video’s title to be geared specifically to the audience’s needs. Leave the “Title” field blank if you want the video to show without a title or text underneath.

Click insert and the video will appear within the block. Save the block and, as always, don’t forget to save and test the email by going to preview, you want to make sure that the video will actually link correctly to any links you include (not just a video).

 

This feature makes it incredibly easy for pretty much anyone to add videos to their email. If I had to say one thing I don’t love about this feature is that it’s limited to integration with YouTube, Vimeo, Goldmail or Blip.TV. I know, I know most people have their videos on YouTube. But if you had the choice between driving the viewer of your email to your website or to YouTube, which would you prefer? On your website you can guide the viewer easily toward what you want their next action to be rather than on YouTube; the giant candy store of visual distractions.

One way to get the viewer to take the next step over to your website is to include a link at the very top of the video description on YouTube (see below). There you could include a call to action to watch the video with additional features, download a free related ebook, etc. Then once they have clicked over to your website, you have them in your playground and you’re holding the ball.

 

My nit-picky comment aside, this is a very cool upgrade by Constant Contact. Ideally you want to drive traffic to your website not YouTube, Vimeo, Goldmail or Blip.TV. The bottom line though is if you keep viewers interacting with you content, no matter where it is – it’s a good thing. Kudos to them for developing this to make it simple for their general user to integrate videos into their email marketing. They’ve also developed a short screencast video showing how to use the new feature. Have you used this to integrate video into your email marketing yet?

 

 

 

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HubSpot, creators of an inbound marketing software that helps businesses get found on the internet, hosted a webinar titled “Beginner’s Guide to Video Marketing”. Although we’ve been involved in online video and animation since 2004, I always like to see what new statistics, tools, tips, etc. I can share with my customers to help them better utilize the animations we create for them. In this post, I put together the “Cliffs Notes” version of the webinar with a few tips and statistics I thought were the most interesting to share with you. If you are interested in listening to the webinar in its entirety, you do so and download the slides from HubSpot’s On Demand Archive of the Beginner’s Guide to Video Marketing.

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The first speaker was Maggie Georgieva, an Inbound Marketing Manager at HubSpot. She shared some interesting insights into how HubSpot utilizes video in their own marketing efforts including case studies for sales empowerment, webinars and events for lead generation. They also build brand awareness through podcasts (like their weekly marketing video podcast HubSpot TV) and entertaining videos (such as the Captain Inbound Animation Series we worked on for HubSpot).

She also shared how video screenshots have performed far better than static images or text links in email marketing. She didn’t share any exact findings but here’s some statistics we compiled about using videos in your email marketing campaigns.

Next up Yelena Kadeykina, the Marketing Director of Pixability, shared a few interesting statistics and suggestions largely around video discovery. She stated that 30-40% of video views are the results of search queries and another 30% are the result of social sharing on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. Think about that. That means that roughly 75% of online video views can be attributed to a combination of proper tagging and SEO optimizing your video and having a social strategy for your video content.

Jay Wilder, the Director of Product Marketing at myBrainshark spoke next about sharing / promoting videos and the importance of placement.

Jay had some great points and did a fantastic overview of how to use and distribute video on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn. The real amazing statistics he presented were regarding mobile and QR codes. According to Nielsen, mobile video viewership soared 40% in 2011 and the smartphone market grew to a 50% market share. He also illustrated how QR codes “connect the online and offline world” through their ability to show you a product in action. I personally believe that combining QR codes with your mobile video strategy will truly start catapulting video marketing to new heights in the next few years. Particularly for people selling products to consumers. Imagine rather than hemming and hawing in a store over Product A or Product B, if Product B has a QR code taking the buyer to an interactive video experience right there on their phone to answer any questions they may have about it…which product are they more likely to buy? That’s where things are going…the industry leaders are already there.

Last up was Jim Kukral who has worked with companies like Fedex and Progressive Auto Insurance understand how find success on the Web. He kept his presentation fairly simple and focused on how to measure video.

One of his points I personally enjoyed was when he talked about how videos on landing pages convert better than traditional text & images. It’s important to remember that people don’t consume content offline the same way that they do online and that is what makes video so effective as a messaging tool.

All in all the presentation had a ton of great content for people new to video marketing as well as some tidbits for someone like myself who has been doing this for a while. One of my favorite quotes from the event was from Jim and it sums up my thoughts on why video is critical to the success of every business marketing online:

“When faced with a choice between a video or a bunch of text – they’re going to choose the video. Recognizing this and building a strategy around it is the type of thing that changes a 1 million dollar company into a 10 million dollar company.”

 

 

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Adélie Studios, a provider of animated marketing videos and tutorial animations, has received the 2010 All Star Award from Constant Contact®, Inc., the trusted marketing advisor to more than 400,000 small organizations worldwide. Adélie Studios is one of Constant Contact’s 2010 top business partners and most prolific user of its tools, whether within Constant Contact’s email marketing, event marketing, social media marketing or survey products – or a combination of all four.

“We’re pleased to be recognized by Constant Contact for helping our customers achieve higher click through rates through integrating video into our customers email marketing strategy,” said Eric Guerin, owner of Adélie Studios. “Our customers utilizing email marketing with video were able to garner a response rate that was on average 10x higher than direct mail and nearly double their click through rate when video content was included. Constant Contact’s services played a big part in helping our customers achieve those engagement goals.”

Constant Contact looked at criteria including the following when selecting this year’s All Stars:

• Frequency of campaigns, events and surveys
• Open, bounce and click through rates
• Usage of social features
• Mailing list sign up tools
• Use of reporting tools

“We work hard to listen to our customers, and we use that feedback to create products and services designed to help them better engage with their customers and prospects,” said Gail Goodman, chairman, president and CEO of Constant Contact. “The Constant Contact All Star Awards are our way of recognizing our customers that have successfully used Constant Contact to market their companies. We have some of the most committed, passionate customers out there and we’re proud we can be a part of their continued success.”

 

 

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Here are some amazing statistics from a client of ours that recently did both a direct mail post card and an online marketing video sent out via email to the exact same client base. They did both methods because they wanted to make sure all of their customers were touched and also because they didn’t have all of their customers email addresses. Due to client confidentiality limitations, we cannot disclose our client’s name.

Business Needs

The business is a service oriented operation with predominantly a business-to-consumer base. They also have a reputation as an environmentally responsible company and try to do what they can to diminish the amount of waste they create. This business was beta testing a new service which would streamline how their customer base would interact with their services. To clarify these changes, answer any questions their customers may have, etc. they needed to reach out to their entire regional customer base of about 16,000 customers. Their objective wasn’t a direct call to action for their customers – but simply to notify and educate them of the new service and to make sure their customers knew who to contact if they had any questions about the service.

Solution

Their internal marketing department had already planned to send out a postcard with a follow up brochure to their entire base of 16,000 customers. They did have over 6400 email addresses for a portion of their client base, so we suggested incorporating an email marketing e-newsletter linking to a short interactive video explaining the changes to the service and including helpful links for more information, download a PDF of the brochure or to contact someone at the company. The postcard was sent out first and the email newsletter with links to the video was sent out two weeks later.

Results

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Postcards sent: 16,000

Direct replies & requests for further information: 12 or 0.075%
(responses were entirely phone calls about the program)

Costs: includes design & printing of postcard, ink jet printing of addresses and postage = $5,470*

*if you include the design & printing, ink jet printing of addresses and postage for the brochure as part of this campaign  – the overall cost was $12010.

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Emails Sent: 6406

Statistics:

• Open Rate (OR) – 43.8% or 2804
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – 44.7% or 1254

Direct replies & requests for further information: 146 or 2.28%
(responses were entirely email responses about the program).

The email responses varied – many were requesting further information, others were thanking the company for how clearly the email, PDF and video explained the upcoming changes to their services and a handful expressed gratitude for the company keeping their message environmentally friendly by using email with the video.

One respondent when asked about the post card remarked that they “didn’t remember ever seeing it” and assumed that they had “thrown it with the rest of the junk mail in the recycling bin”.

Costs: includes email service provider subscription*, web hosting provider & domain for landing page*, design for email newsletter & landing page to host video, PDF and FAQs about program and the online video production = $4176

* Email Service Provider (ESP), domain registration and web hosting were all yearly billing costs included in the overall budget for this one campaign.

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Final thoughts

From the perspective of action the clear winner was email marketing with video which garnered a response rate that was 11x higher than direct mail. While their varied customer demographic will never allow for a completely emailed list, the results from direct responses and the ability to track the emails effectiveness through the email service providers statistical tracking data are obvious.

From a cost perspective on the single campaign its also clear that email marketing with video was obviously not only more effective but far less expensive. This is especially noticeable when you factor in that the email service provider, domain registration and web hosting costs (in the amount of $901) were all for one full year, not just this single campaign.

This brings up another important issue, which is that this service was only launched to a fraction of their customer base as part of a beta test of the program. So if they choose to open the program to a wider selection of their customer base – with direct mail all of their production costs will repeat (with the exception of their initial post card design costs if there are no edits to the content) while with email and video they will absorb a fraction of those email service provider and web hosting yearly fees and they may need to tweak the email content but other than that the second blast of this information using email marketing and video is completely paid for and they have endless distribution.

The company’s program director expressed his thoughts on how the campaign worked out by sharing, “E-mail made it so much easier for our customers to respond because they could simply click to reply to get more information. They also loved the fact that the video so clearly illustrated how the new service would work.”

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How Stanford University increased alumni donations.

Seeing how I’ve already talked about how integrating video in your email marketing can increase your click throughs by 175% I thought I’d profile another success story I read about online. Much of the information on this is exerpted from a great blog post by Tyler Willis for MediaPost called “When Juggernauts Collide: Email Marketing Meets Video Marketing” Here are the highlights of what I found most interesting from his post.

“Recent grads are far more likely to give a valid email address than a number (93% of the captive population vs. 38%), meaning that email marketing gives Stanford a better and more widespread ability to connect.”

Snail mail and “dialing-for-dollars” are incredibly inefficient ways to connect with new grads. Namely because direct mail is assumed to be junk mail by most recipients and you only get a response of about 2% (if you are lucky). Phone calling on the other hand is incredibly interruptive, who knows what the end user was doing or what you interrupted them from doing. Email is passive and can be opened or read when the end user is ready to read or respond to it.

Scott Jahnke, the Director of Student and Young Alumni Development, explains why he chose to combine email AND video as part of Stanford’s new alumni drive “Technology gives us the ability to do so much more than just text. How then, can we most effectively tell our story to thousands of people and inspire them to give? I believe that a combination of using email AND video to answer our three questions (why are we asking you for a gift, what is going to change if you give, and how will our organization make that change happen) is the so-called ‘secret sauce.”

“At Stanford, the Young Alumni office produced several inspiring videos of students who had directly benefited from alumni contributions and attached a clear call-to-action to the end of each video, delivered via a Flash overlay that asked viewers to donate.”

This was key, by providing this call to action they were able to easily and effectively drive their alumni to take the steps they wanted them to take. Without a call-to-action, online video doesn’t effectively do it’s job.

“Calling out these videos, and providing a direct link to them in four out of five emails sent during Stanford’s fall campaign, helped increase gifts by 23% over the previous year’s fall campaign.”

This is a great first result and if they continue to refine their approach will probably become even more efficient. Couple this with the fact that they probably dramatically reduced their printing and postage costs from their direct mail campaign and/or their costs if they hired current students to do the telemarketing as part of a work study program. How does that affect their operational costs? Does it make their alumni gifts go longer.

If one of the most respected universities in the United States was able to buck the old trend of typical alumni gift campaigns and get these kind of outstanding results, what could combining the online marketing super powers of email marketing and online video do for your business or non-profit?

 

 

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