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Email marketing has, by far, the greatest ROI of all marketing channels at $36 returned for every dollar spent.A1
So what happens when we introduce video into our email marketing efforts?
Big things.
Like…
- Increased open rates
- Putting the word “video” in your subject line can increase open rates by 19%, increase click-through rates by 65%, and decreases unsubscribes by 26%.35
- More memorable campaigns
- People are 13% more likely to remember details from video emails over text emails.36
- And much higher click-through rates
- Adding video to emails can increase click-through rates by an average of 300%37
And turning some of those customer success stories into gifs can be a useful weapon in your email campaign arsenal: Reports show that gifs can increase your CTR by up to 40%.38
Let’s dig into some of the ways to use your video case studies to supercharge your emails.
Sales Campaigns
Whatever you’re selling, you need proof.
And your video success stories are bona fide proof of your company’s awesomeness.
So include your stories in emails to:
- Speak to specific features: Use clips from your video testimonials in gif form to back up your claims during promotions
- Sell new products, cross-sell or upsell: Show off the effectiveness of your new product with video testimonials gathered from beta users or early purchasers.
Or include video testimonials around other products during nurture campaigns.
- Increase engagement and memorability: Videos in email can reduce inbox fatigue and help recipients retain more of the message when compared to text-based email.39
One particularly useful place to utilize these types of emails is in following up with prospects before or after calls with the sales team.
Sometimes this is an automated email sequence, other times this could simply be email templates that the sales team utilizes in follow-ups with prospects (see our first article on the Success Story Silo).
Newsletters
If you’re regularly emailing your customers, consider including up-to-date news of your client success stories to show that you’re staying relevant in your industry.
It’s another opportunity to build engagement, upsell, and keep your business top of mind.
And if you’re regularly creating success stories (and you should be in order to stay relevant) then you can even add a consistently occuring section in your newsletter to show off your latest success.
Individual email signatures
Remember that gifs can increase your CTR?
All of your team members could have a small gif in their email signatures, relevant to the audience they most commonly speak to, linked to the full case study page or a landing page of your choice.
You can use your Success Story Silo from article 1 to make this ‘changing of the (gif) guard’ a cinch.
Alternatively, consider using an enticing quote from your customer success story that links to the case study landing page.
Proposals
Video proposals are already more powerful than regular old text proposals.
Reports from Proposify show that adding a video to your proposal can increase close rates by up to 41%.40
And including customer success clips in your sales teams’ video proposals simply makes good sense.
It’s the time when you need to prove you can do what you say and including real customers telling their real success stories is persuasive dynamite.
By showing your prospect footage from people like them, who once shared the same problems as they currently have, you demonstrate the effectiveness of your solution beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But it’s not just increased closing potential that video offers.
It can also shorten your sales cycle and increase engagement. The same study by Proposify showed that video drives 56% higher proposal engagement and helps close your deal 26% faster.41
How To Do It:
Start by using your Success Story Silo to narrow down your case studies to find the one that’s the best fit for your prospect.
The closer it matches their situation, the better.
If you’re split on choosing between two or more case studies, consider the match in terms of these variables, from most important to least:
- Problem
- Desired outcome
- Market
- Company Size
- Role
As for how to actually implement the video in your proposal, you could use proposify.com (we’re not affiliated with them in any way, but we hear good things.)
There are also a few other options:
- Add a video thumbnail in your email and link to your video
- Include a quote from the video (think intrigue-building information gaps, per our 3rd article in this series: APRIL: The Formula For Unignorable Ads And 4x ROAS)
- Use another SaaS option like journey.io to include your video (or even a series of them) following or as part of your proposal.
Conclusion:
There’s a reason we keep harping on about how multifunctional video case studies are: there simply aren’t many areas of your business that can’t benefit from them.
Email is just another tool in this swiss army knife of your customer’s words.
And we’re not done yet…
But we’re getting close.
If you’re not subscribed already, sign up below for access to the full value of our 7-part series on the use cases for customer success stories.
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With only 2 more articles to go, join us for our next one, Powering Up Your Events, where we’ll cover how you can…
- Use your video case studies to pre-jazz your audience
- Build trust at talks and expos
- And generate greater attention and engagement without more effort
