Targeted Email Marketing With Videos: Build Interest, Build Conversions

Targeted email marketing is one of those games where you know it’s all about profit, but you want your customers to think it’s all about quality content — and to a degree, today’s consumers are starting to get sensitive enough that it’s hard to fool them. Our spamometers are getting to the point where even the most cleverly-crafted of headlines won’t keep us reading for more than a sentence if we catch a whiff of salesmanship in an email.

That’s why today many companies are turning to embedded videos. Videos are hard for people to turn away from — they engage more of the brain, and they tell the watcher exactly how long they’ll have to watch (5:41). It’s a funny fact of psychology that someone will watch a video that’s “only 4 minutes long”, but they won’t finish reading a page of text that would have only required 55 seconds to read.

In the past, videos have been pooh-poohed because of bandwidth considerations and because people were paranoid about opening a file from anyone they didn’t personally know — but those days are fading. Mobile devices might not have the bandwidth to handle a video, but we have the technology now to force the video to not show up if the device is mobile. Similarly, web security is robust enough these days that most people are willing to send and open videos. So this is prime territory.

The best part is that, when you make a video to put into a targeted email, you can just as easily put the same video up on YouTube and use it as a video-based form of organic SEO, put the same video up a week or two later on your blog, and so forth — videos aren’t subject to the Google duplicate content penalty because a spider can’t read the content of a video.

You will have to put your content marketing team on the task of creating relevant con-text-ual content for the video a few times over, taking a new spin on it each time, but compared to the effort of creating a video in the first place, making a few new words to go around it shouldn’t be at all difficult.