Do you want to revamp your email marketing strategy? Read ahead to find out how you can use videos in your email marketing strategy.
Email is one of the best ways to reach out to your prospects. A well-crafted email means more customer engagement, and with the attention of your subscribers comes an increased probability of converting them to customers.
There are many ways to boost email marketing engagement. But one way that provides consistent results is incorporating video in your marketing strategy.
In this blog post, we’ll use the buyer’s journey to identify eleven types of videos you can create and use in your email marketing campaigns for optimal results.
In this blog post, we’ll use the buyer’s journey to identify eleven types of videos you can create and use in your email marketing campaigns for optimal results.
Breaking Down The Buyer’s Journey
As marketers, we wish that getting a customer is as simple as a first-time visitor landing on our site and making a purchase. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?
But I’m sure you’ll agree that that’s rarely the case. There’s a process every lead you acquire goes through to become a paying customer. This process is called the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey refers to the stages your customer passes through to go from being a stranger to a paying customer.
The way you nurture leads makes all the difference in how quickly they move through their journey towards a sale. And if you’re going to be using video in your email marketing, the kinds of videos you use at each stage make all the difference.
To use video in your email marketing, you need to have a deep understanding of each stage of the buyer’s journey and what kind of messages make sense at that stage.
Bringing Email and Video Together
James Wedmore, the author of the YouTube Marketing Book, said that video is an effective form of communication and should be integrated into every aspect of your marketing efforts.
And the statistics show it, too. 54% of email subscribers claim that they prefer emails with videos. But what type of videos should you use in your email marketing campaign?
Awareness
At this stage, your buyers realize that there is a problem. But they aren’t sure how to solve it, so they go online to find possible solutions.
To get their attention, you should publish content that addresses the specific pain points your leads experience.
The aim here isn’t to close the buyers. Instead, your goal should be to improve brand visibility and acquire new visitors for your site with whom you can share your marketing campaigns by getting their email addresses through the email finder tool
Video Marketing at the Awareness Stage
Once a lead enrols in your email marketing, it’s time to familiarize them with what your brand, product, and/or service offering is all about.
Right out the gate, create videos. An initial sales email with a video can increase your click-through rate by 96%.
Company Culture Videos
In your emails, you can embed videos that promote your company’s culture and show your brand’s human side. These videos are great icebreakers and can make new subscribers feel more aligned with your brand.
Quick Tours
Another video type that will work well here is quick tours of your product or software. Using these types of videos in the awareness stage will help your leads better understand what your product and/or service offering is all about.
Pro Tip: Don’t feel you have to restrict these videos to emails alone. Making them easily accessible on your website or your social media accounts helps promote awareness among people who haven’t yet subscribed to your emails.
Consideration
At this stage, your buyers are more familiar with your business. They now have a better idea of possible solutions to their problems, and your brand is on their radar as a possible solution.
Your job now is to help buyers see the value you are offering and understand what sets you apart from your competitors. Talk about the solution, what features buyers need, and why they need it.
Video Marketing at the Consideration Stage
For this stage, you’ll need videos that show prospects how to use your product to solve their problems.
Demo Videos
These pre-recorded videos are similar to quick tours but more in-depth. They’re a chance for you to highlight your various features of your product or certain elements of your service offering that are compelling and helpful to your current customers.
Bonus Read: How to Make Demo Videos that Convert and Drive Sales
Product Tours
Based on how you choose to segment your leads at the consideration stage, you can highlight various products and send them to the right segments.
For example, let’s say you own a software company that builds various platforms and tools for restaurants and small businesses to manage online orders.
If a lead at this stage is in the restaurant industry, you can send them a product tour video that showcases your online reservation software.
Pro tip: As you use video to promote your product, make sure that you are focused on helping prospects solve their problems.
Decision
Buyers, at this stage, already have a thorough understanding of their problem and how to solve it. After analyzing the options available, they’re ready to make a decision.
If you’ve done your job well in the previous stages, then you should have already established yourself as a trusted voice. The task of landing buyers should be easier now, but your job isn’t over. You still have to influence the final decision.
Video Marketing at the Decision Stage
According to the Wyzowl State of Video Marketing Survey, 84% of consumers reported that they were influenced to make a purchase by a video. So what kind of videos can you use to influence your lead’s decision?
Case Studies
Case studies are essential. They help prospects feel what it’s like to work with you by highlighting the success of your existing customers. Turn that idea on its head by making your case studies videos.
You can set up interviews with your clients and ask them specific questions about how they measure success from your partnership.
Bonus Read: How to Make Amazing Interview Videos
Competitor Comparisons
Before someone makes a purchase decision, they typically weigh the pros and cons of a few options.
Do the dirty work for them by creating videos that compare your product or service against your competitors, outlining what makes your option desirable and beneficial at addressing various needs you know prospects have.
Customer Testimonials
Compile your customer testimonials into a video playlist and share it with your prospects. Have your customers film a quick five-second spot describing why they would recommend using you to others.
Pro tip: There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. You’re already creating this kind of content so just think outside the box a little bit by turning it into videos.
Closed Lost
Here’s a fact that we marketers don’t like: 80% of new leads never translate into sales.
This could be for several reasons. It could be that the buyers just aren’t ready yet. Or they aren’t convinced about the suitability of your product to their needs.
Whatever the reason, all is not lost yet. These buyers can still be closed, albeit at a future date. Keep in touch with them by providing valuable content, so they consider you as a solution down the line.
Video Marketing at the Closed Lost Stage
An important rule of thumb is to not give up on those that do not convert immediately. Instead, use videos to re-engage with them.
Webinars
Webinars are a great way to offer tips and pointers to leads in an easily digestible way.
There’s little commitment on the part of the lead, either, as all they have to do is sit back and watch. There is no gimmick or ulterior motive, just a way to put your brand front and center by offering helpful advice.
Product Launches
Show your closed lost prospects what your brand is up to, and create a little FOMO in the process. Share exciting product launches, which may help scratch an itch and get them to come crawling back.
Closed Won
Congratulations! You’ve just landed a paying customer.
But your job’s far from done (it never ends). Acquiring a new customer costs five times more than retaining an existing one. So, it makes great business sense to keep what you have, right?
You can do this by delighting your customer with exceptional customer service. Show them new ways to use your products, offer discounts, and check on them regularly.
Consistent outreach and customer support will help create an emotional connection that will foster loyalty. Plus, you get to enjoy free advertisement as satisfied customers are likely to become promoters of your brand.
Video Marketing at the Closed Won Stage
The customer journey doesn’t end once your lead converts to a customer. You still have to continuously delight them if you want them to become long-term customers.
Use Case Videos
You could write lengthy step-by-step tutorials and post them in your knowledge base. Or, you could create a video knowledge base that walks your customers through each product feature, showing them real-life scenarios on how to use them.
Customer Success Workshops
Set your customers up for success by showing them exactly how to use your product. Pick a theme or an aspect of your product and go through a virtual tutorial that they can watch time and again whenever they need to.
These can also be live and sent to your customers who didn’t attend later, which can show them that you’re always thinking of ways they can get the most out of your product.
This brings us to the end of this post. We hope this helps.
Consider transforming some of your already created content into videos, or think of fresh ideas to engage your leads.
Depending on the stage in the buyer's journey, these videos will help you push your leads towards becoming paying, loyal, satisfied customers.
Other Interesting Use Cases
In addition to all the applications mentioned above video emails can be deployed in the following situations as well.
Announcements: Video emails can be used to announce new product lines, feature additions and product integrations. For products, you can create a video of a user or an influencer using your product and sharing feedback, it’s an easy way to generate some interest and also initiate some word of mouth marketing.
For SAAS products, video emails can be used to announce a new product integration or a new feature, similar to the previous case, these announcements can be accompanied with demo videos or videos.
Apart from products and services, events and webinars can also benefit from video based announcements. Videos can be send prior to the event briefly outlining the agenda and why users should attend them. Once the event/webinar is done a video that contains a recap of the whole event can be sent to both attendees and non-attendees.
Bonus content: Any content that’s created for loyal longtime subscribers to delight/thank them can fall under the umbrella of bonus content. the purpose of the video email can be to offer sneak peak of upcoming product/service improvements, bonus content, video courses for subscribers, behind the scenes content etc.
Video newsletters: As touched upon earlier, including video in newsletters is an effective email marketing example to increase engagement rate. Videos have the benefit of covering a wide range of topics in short time when compared to written content. Take advantage of both the above mentioned factors videos neww to be made a regular part of newsletters.
Videos in newsletters can be used to recap industry trends, best practices, blog round ups, announcements etc.
Hope you have picked inspiration and ideas for your next email marketing campaign, Good luck!