Email marketing should be a big part of your mix to distribute any online video created to market or promote your business, service or product. It is a great tool to touch base with your existing customer base and if that video is done creatively, is a simple and easy way for your customers to pass your message on to friends.

I regularly have recommended in the Constant Contact Community and when I speak at seminars of how best to integrate email marketing with online video. One of the statistics I use is one I got a few years back from the Email Standards Project where their research showed that a “…screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link.” Of course being a video production company I latched onto these stats and used them to my benefit. I’ve seen these statistics used as part of Email Marketing Reports, but then I wondered – what would my own research find?

We already knew from the Adelie Studios Video Marketing newsletter that we were getting a really high click-through rate compared to industry standards and most were going to the new video that we include every month (if you’re interested in our super awesome monthly email on video marketing tips, you can subscribe to it here). Most of those clicks were coming from the screen-grab JPEG image of the video with a play button which “looks” like it will play but actually links to the video on our website rather than using the text link to that same video. Here were the cumulative statistics for our open rate and our click through rates for 12 e-newsletters which amounts to several thousand emails going out:

Cumulative Open Rate: 48%

Cumulative Click Through Rate: 44%

So then on two occasions we decided NOT to include a video with a screen-grab link in our e-newsletter and instead sent out just informative articles, upcoming events or blog posts. All good content…just no video. Our statistics for these two e-newsletters were:

Cumulative Open Rate: 47%

Cumulative Click Through Rate: 16%

It wasn’t a full 5x as often but including video in our campaigns was a very significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included. Another really interesting fact is that our open rate remained virtually the same which basically means there is a 64% decrease in the number of click-throughs on our e-newsletter when we do not include video.

I hope you find these statistics as interesting and useful as I did. Now my head hurts from all that math so I’m going to have to get back to doing something creative. With these statistics in mind…have you included video in your email marketing campaign? What have your results been?

Eric Guerin is the founder of Adelie Studios. He chooses to use his creative powers for good and not evil by helping businesses to better market themselves using animated marketing videos. He can easily be bribed with coffee. Read more of Eric’s posts.