The Video Wizard

Any good marketer should be testing and measuring their results and promotions on a constant basis.

Yesterday, I decided to try something with my email subscribers which revealed a very powerful email marketing strategy that is guaranteed to drive more traffic to your website and higher click throughs with your emails.

It has been proven time and time again that video adds huge value to email marketing – this case study demonstrates exactly how this works. I’m going to share some statistics with you from my emails which I’m sure you’ll find very interesting. In fact, one of the insights revealed in this post could change the way you market your business online dramatically.

I sent an email newsletter out yesterday that went out to thousands of people. The newsletter had several links to articles on this blog and several fun videos that I thought would be of value to my readers. These videos had nothing to do with my product or service, they were purely there for entertainment value.

The subject line for the email was “World Record Video – check this out…”. By adding the word video to the subject line it helps increase the open rates – people love to watch video and if you entice them with this in the subject line it helps you get more attention and exposure with your email list.

There were plain text links through to articles on the blog along with video thumbnails in the email that took people through to the videos on YouTube.

What was interesting for me was that hundreds of people clicked on the links, but a good 80% of them went through to watch the videos on YouTube. Great to get the clicks and that engagement, but disappointing to miss out on all that traffic. I sent hundreds of people to YouTube, when I could have sent them back to my website to watch the videos instead.

Two things to learn from this…

1. Use video in your email content to add value to your list and encourage more engagement with your audience. Even if the videos you share have nothing to do with your business, at least people are getting some immediate value from you and they can look forward to opening your emails in future if there is good content like this in them.

2. Don’t send the traffic direct to YouTube. It is very easy to embed the video on your own website and drive this traffic through to you – above, below and to the sides of the video are great opportunities for you to advertise or get people to read the latest content on your blog.

I found the stats really interesting when I looked at them this morning and it highlighted a massive opportunity to leverage the power of the amazing video content available for free on YouTube.

Play around with this a bit too – I was talking to the marketing team at The Barbagallo Group a few years ago and was telling them they should have videos from Top Gear all over their website. What cool videos can you get online that help promote your products or services that you can access for free?

Something to think about and certainly something for you to try yourself in your next email campaign. Watch your statistics – they’ll prove immediately that what I’m saying is true.