Videos in email: case studies and resources

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 13, 2007

One of the long unanswered questions about email marketing is whether you can combine video and email in a way that works.

Like many interactive features, there are question marks over how reliably videos display when viewed within an email.

It now seems some best practices are emerging, given some recent posts and articles that crossed my desktop.

First, news of three separate companies claiming significant success with using videos in email campaigns.

Diana Dilworth reports on the results achieved by the Intercontinental Hotel Group and Wachovia. While MarketingSherpa has a case study on a video email campaign by Brighter Blooms Nursery.

The common factor in all three cases: the emails contain links to videos hosted at a website. Not videos embedded in the email itself.

If the sensible move is to use email to drive people to your video message, how do you best format the call to action?

A best practice might also be emerging here. eROI's Dylan Boyd and the folk at Emma Email Marketing both have blog posts and screenshots praising email which include both text links and image links to the online video.

The clever bit is that the images are snapshots of a video player showing a still from the video. So clicking on the player (as if you wanted to use it) will take you off to the website for online viewing.

Check the comments section on Dylan's post for discussion on the validity of the approach and an alternative.

Video looks to have a bright future among the YouTube generation and in a web world replete with enough high-speed broadband not to care about bandwidth issues anymore.

For more help on your video efforts, try this list of 150+ online video tools and resources from the folk at Mashable.

Bad design drives unsubscribes?

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 15, 2007

More tears were shed in 2007 over rendering problems than perhaps any other email marketing issue. Outlook 2007 broke some designer hearts and much ink has gone into suggesting ways to ensure your design works well wherever people look at it.

Not much actually gets said, though, about the consequences of emails that look ugly in particular clients or webmail services.

We kind of assume it hurts response rates, but is the reaction more extreme than just a missed click?

Buried deep within a small survey by StoneShot of the email habits of independent financial advisers (see press release) is this little gem...

When asked "What would cause you to unsubscribe from an email?", 73% said irrelevant content. (Another vote for relevancy and targeting there). But 8% said "Email does not display properly."

Leaving aside the statistical significance of that result, it's certainly a warning to those (ahem...like me) who thought a few ugly emails can't do too much harm.

Email has this nasty habit of inviting negative responses rather than just an absence of positive ones. A critical point.

Write a bad newspaper ad, people ignore it. Write a bad email, people report you as spam or unsubscribe from all future emails from you. Nobody can unsubscribe from your newspaper ads.

Just another reason to keep on chasing those best practices.

Talking of design and best practices...a couple of new links to help...

Mark Wyner tested various clients and webmail services to see how they handled image maps. Here are the results.

And Anna Billstrom has added another example to her one-woman crusade to bring home the importance of image blocking to email design.

More on design and blocked images | Tags: email marketing, email design, image blocking