Promoting Your Small Business With Video Emails

Including personalized videos within marketing emails can help small businesses stand out from their competitors and improve engagement with customers and prospects.

Everyone gets far too many marketing emails, making it more difficult for your message to resonate within your audience’s crowded inboxes. Adding a personalized video and including the word "video" in your subject line, can pause rapid scrolling and prompt your prospect or customer to view your message while competing messages remain unopened.

Including videos in your marketing messages takes advantage of the growing popularity of online video and leverages personalization to increase engagement and the percentage of your audience members who take your desired action. A video, for instance, is harder for most people to ignore than yet another check-in email.

Letting prospects and customers watch you deliver a message in a compelling video can also increase trust and make your other marketing efforts more recognizable and memorable.

Getting Started

You have a few choices when it comes to embedding a video within an email marketing campaign. Some apps, such as Hippo Video and Loom, allow you to record messages using a mobile app or a browser extension. You can either send a message directly through the app, or embed that message within your email program.

Similarly, most email service providers allow you to post a personalized video to YouTube or Vimeo, and then embed that video either directly within the message or through a link to the video on hosting service. That video will be represented by a thumbnail that’s designed to look like a "play button."

With either approach, your customers and prospects will likely be watching your video as soon as they open your message.

Potential uses for video messages include:

• Booking meetings. Video emails are still new enough that their novelty value will help increase your response rate.
• Offering discounts. You can send a generic message that make different offers to large groups such as customers and prospects. You may want to, for instance, offer a larger discount to current customers than to prospects.
• Purchase thank-you. A video message thanking a new customer can help you show your appreciation, as well as your willingness to support your customer with any questions they may have.

Effective Targeting

As with any marketing campaign, an important first step is identifying the key prospects and customers you want to target with a video message. A good starting point for planning what you want to say is reminding the recipient of your last interaction and outlining a message that will identify the next step in your relationship.

You also want to be sure you’re using good lighting and an attractive video background that won’t distract from your message.

It’s important to outline the ideas you want to express, but you don’t have to script them precisely. Scripting will lead to reading, which will seem less authentic than delivering your message directly

You also want to keep your message short, preferably under two minutes, so the viewer sticks with your message until the end and sees your suggested call to action. Be sure to spell out your ask clearly, and spell out how the viewer should carry out that step. For instance, you may say something like, "click the link below to set up a short conversation."