Video in newsletters - Why, and how you should do it (+ a new way to do it that increases conversions)
Newsletter overdose is a real thing. It starts by signing up for one, then another and another. After a while, you find yourself simply archiving the newsletters without reading them.
As a business owner, if you find yourself in that “Archive” bucket it means you’ve failed to differentiate yourself and your newsletter wasn’t engaging enough to make it into the regular circulation of 3-5 newsletters that your customer regularly reads.
Adding video in newsletters is a good way to avoid this.
Videos are highly engaging, they can show off your brand personality and they can transfer much more information than text. The majority of people will choose to watch a 3 minute video that’s fun over reading 500 words.
Your customer needs to look forward to your newsletter. It should be engaging, filled with value, and fun to read. That’s the only way you’ll make it into regular circulation.
Videos in newsletters can be your fast lane into the regular circulation. Because it’s a video, there is much more flexibility in terms of content you can create. With a newsletter, you are bounded by the fact that it’s text, that attention spans are the lowest ever, and by the medium - email. That’s why you should expand its power of it by adding a video in newsletters.
I know that this makes sense to you, it’s pretty logical when you think about it. Let’s talk examples.
Video In Newsletters - Examples
Video should be a tool for extending your current newsletter. Don’t re-invent the wheel, if you have a working newsletter, then the video should be an upgrade.
This could, for example, be a video recap of an event, workshop, or webinar you did recently. A video recap that’s put into the newsletter after it could be an engaging way to deliver your message and sell the tickets for the next event.
Showing off new features or products is also much more effective in video form than in text. A video in the newsletter that goes through your newest feature will excite the current users, and it might be that feature that converts the new ones. Showing how your new product is used is something you can only do in video form. That’s why adding a video in the newsletter that announces the new product maximizes your chances of success.
Customers love behind the scenes content. It gives them the chance to feel your brand personality, and a peek behind the closed doors - which always feels cool because you feel like a part of some “exclusive” club. Creating this type of content and adding it via video in newsletters can boost customer loyalty, and bring in new sales.
Client success videos are sales enablement superweapons. Chances are you have a lot of customers that are signed up for your newsletter but haven’t converted yet. These client success videos show them how people similar to them use your product and what benefits are they getting. You are probably already creating these (and you know the value of them), so adding them as a video in your newsletter should be a piece of cake.
These are just some of the examples. I’m sure there are many more that i missed but at least you can start somewhere. When thinking of video in newsletter ideas, think of upgrades. What’s a video that will add more value to my newsletter and cement it place in the regular circulation.
Video In Newsletters - How to do it
Video and newsletters don’t necessarily go together in terms of tech. There isn’t a native way of embedding a video in an email (like you can do with pictures) and that’s why you have to resort to a bit of a workaround. You’ll need to add videos as links. They can be added as:
- open links,
- linked to a button,
- or by adding a thumbnail and adding a link to that thumbnail. This one is the best.
In order to make sure that the end user actually knows that it’s a video, one of the most common things to do is to take a screenshot of the video, and add a play button icon over it. Add a link to that image, and voila - you got yourself a video thumbnail with a link inside of the newsletter.
An upgrade for this can be if you create a gif and add a link to that gif. If you have a lot of images in your newsletter, your video can be missed easily. If you add it as a gif, that’s going to be a bit harder.
Videos are a great way to level up your newsletter. But it’s not all rainbow and sunshine when it comes to video, ESPECIALLY when it comes to personalization. Newsletters are personalized to the sender, videos are not - they are static.
Sure, it doesn’t make sense to personalize a behind the scene video. You create one, and it’s meant to be consumed by everyone. But there are a few use cases where it’s better to use video instead of plain text that require personalization.
These are:
- special offers
- event invites/recaps
- understanding your bill videos
- monthly/yearly reports
- and more…
All of these use cases have a proven track record of doing better in a video format than in text format. Wyzowl says that 73% of customers prefer to watch a short video. Compare this to 11% who’d rather read a text-based article, website, or post.
Just imagine sending your customer a newsletter that contains a video with a special offer MADE JUST FOR THEM. This special offer can be based on items that they browse in your shop, or their abandoned cart and similar.
You may be wondering why wouldn't i just add the special offer in the text format. Well, that’s not hyper-personalized to the user, and since we saw above that video performs better than text - you'll be leaving revenue on the table.
With this example in your mind, you can see why it makes sense to add video in newsletters, especially personalized ones. But up until now, there wasn’t a way to execute a campaign like this. You can’t make all of these videos by hand.
With this example in your mind, you can see why it makes sense to add video in newsletters, especially personalized ones. But up until now, there wasn’t a way to execute a campaign like this. You can’t make all of these videos by hand.
Well, that’s changed.
Video In Newsletter - Automation & Personalization
Creating a personalized video campaign for your newsletter takes one hour in Plainly. Literally. From the moment you get the idea, to the moment you start sending personalized videos in newsletters takes one hour.
Plainly is a video generation API. This means that it:
- integrates with your email sender
- automatically creates videos that are personalized to each recipient
- gives you a link to that video which can be embedded in the email automatically
Everything related to the video is determined by you. You create the design, dimensions, music/voiceover, length and all of that. Because it’s an API, it can also be integrated with any tool you like. This means that it can also pull data from a database, a Google sheet, another API and similar to create the most effective, most engaging video for your customer.
If you wish to learn more how we created this workflow, step-by-step, you can take a look at this article on creating Email Marketing Videos. The above is just an example, in reality, there are dozens of use cases like this. The best thing of all? Plainly can execute all of them.
Video In Newsletter - Closing Words
There are a ton of stats that encourage using video. For example:
- 87% of marketers say video has helped them increase traffic
- 81% of marketers say video has helped them directly increase sales
- 88% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
(Wyzowl, Video Marketing Statistics 2022)
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
There are hundreds of stats like this. I feel like the debate if video is effective or not is done - the outcome is clear. This said, as a business owner, you need to find ways to leverage video in as many marketing channels as possible.
Adding videos in newsletters is one of them.
