By John Gaydon (c) 2010
I know the concept of video email is quite new. Imagine receiving a birthday video email, information on a property you were seeking, or advanced notice of a new car model with a video of it in the email. Certainly providing links to videos on emails is becoming common, and many marketers do that. So why not take the next step?
What You Can and Cannot Do
First, right now, embedding a video in an email is not possible. One day it might happen, but right now email servers don't have the necessary software for this. This means text links or graphics.
Research suggests that using a graphical representation of your video and then providing a direct link to the video email is the best way to achieve video emailing right now.
The Case For Video Emails
In an article by Mark Brownlow, "Video email: current practices", he discusses the research on video emailing. There are some interesting statistics.
Looking at this statistic, it is obvious that video is now acceptable to most Internet viewers. "According to comScore, US Internet users viewed 14.8 billion online videos in January, with YouTube alone scoring over 100 million unique viewers in that same period." Finally video has come of age, and we are all conditioned to use it.
Comparing emails with or without a video link - "When not linking to video his clíck through rate is between 20-27%...when linking to online video it's consistently between 51-65%" says Anna Yeaman. We know that a video link receives a much better open rate than a simple text message.
With an image in the email, views are 5-10 times as many!
Campaign Monitor reported that: "the screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link."
Mark Brownlow says of his own email campaigns: "In my own newsletters, a video image attracts between two and ten times the clicks that the accompanying text link gets."
Do you get this? If you have a properly constructed image in your email, 5-10 times more people will clíck on the link and view your video. If you are in sales, information dissemination, or advertising what would you pay to have 5-10 times more people view your message?
Direct Video or Video With a Link
When considering video email, there are three possibilities;
1. A text link.
2. A video thumbnail.
3. The video plays within the email.
Video Text Link
We are all familiar with text links pointing to videos. These are common in emails now. The challenge is that the link is usually a bunch of numbers and meaningless symbols and not very sexy! The author puts a catchy headline in there to entice you to click. Now you get about double clíck through rates when you direct your emails to a video, so it is pretty good compared to sending them to a text blog entry for instance.
Video Thumbnail
A Video thumbnail is where you get a picture to click on in order to play the video email. A really well produced image looks like a play button. When you click on the image it opens up a browser and plays the email seamlessly. When using a video thumbnail like this, the research suggests a 5-10 times better response than a standard text link! This is huge.
It is not intrusive, as you only see the video if you click on the link. We believe this is the best way to use video email right now, and the research backs us up. Compared to an email with a simple text link to a blog post, you are likely to see a 10-20 times greater open rate. This is phenomenal.
Video Within the Email
There is an email company or two around now that will send an email with a video in it. While this seems great, imagine receiving 20 emails and every time you click on one a video starts paying! I think this is intrusive, and many are likely to get angry at the invasion of their personal space. As well, with most of them you need special software or plug-ins to view them.
Because of this in your face aspect, I would suggest that the best form of video email now and into the future will be the thumbnail version, where with the click of a mouse a high quality video plays seamlessly.
What Video Email Service Should You Use?
I think by now you can see why I am so excited by the concept of video email. It is exciting, new and I believe in the same space as TV was when it first appeared. Right now video emails are not that common. This means sending a message this way is very likely to get opened. As people become more familiar with the technology, expect even better response to video emails and reduced openings of more traditional text links.
After I was Introduced to Video Email, I did my homework to see what was available.
COMF5
Formerly hello, hello, this company has been around for a while. The cost is $39.95 for up to 5,000 email addresses and bandwidth is limited to 40GB. There is no commission payable at this level and to earn residual income you need to pay $99.95 a month.
Their video templates are fairly ordinary and in my opinion, unattractive.
Deliverability is fine. There is no mention of free autoresponders.
EYEJOT
This is a free service if you want to send videos less than 1 minute long. You can upgrade to a 5 minute service for $99.95 a year with tracking. No referral commissions are payable, and there are no autoresponders.
Once again, the actual video template is fairly ordinary and not eye catching. Nevertheless, for a free service, providing you only want to send short messages to people you know, it would be okay.
There is no video conferencing and the basic service can't be loaded onto YouTube, etc.
