How to Optimize Video for Email

This may seem obvious since this is a video about optimizing for video, but it’s important to know why. Email fills us all with a little anxiety. Don’t check it for two days and somehow you have 300 unopened emails that are all urgent! But how do your emails break through the clutter that fills most people’s Inbox?

According to HubSpot, video in an email increases click-through rate by 200 to 300 percent. So make sure your emails include video.

Find someone in your office who has great Instagram photo captions and chances are that person will probably be useful for email subject lines too. 33% of email recipients open an email based on subject line alone. Use the word video in your subject line so people know that video is waiting for them on the other side of a click.

The play button is the strongest call-to-action on the internet, so make sure your viewers can easily see a play button with a quality thumbnail.

In your email, have a thumbnail or GIF of the video that links to a landing page on your website with the actual video embedded. Due to the power of the play button, it’ll trick your users into clicking. Learn how to embed a GIF into email right here. 

Not every email you send can relate to video… or can it? If you include a video in your email signature to promote your latest content, it’s a great way to include video in every single email.

Get a video platform that’s a step above YouTube. This is not completely necessary, but it will give you a leg up. I love YouTube, but free hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo won’t give you advanced analytics. At Consume, we use Wistia to host our videos. Wistia gives us advanced analytics and heat maps that show us who is watching what content.

We are a cell phone-centric society and almost half of all emails are opened with mobile devices, so make sure your email template is responsive! You don’t want your audience deleting your email simply because they can’t view your email properly.

The best ways to optimize video for email is by using catchy subject lines, utilizing the play button, putting video in your email signature, using a video marketing platform, and optimizing for mobile.