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Video Email Marketing is Here: 3 Ways to Add Video to Your Emails

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Video content has always been a huge win for email marketers: it can lift click-through rates 200-300% and 45.5% of marketers say it increases their conversion rates significantly.

They’re ideal for adding a human element to your emails, whether you’re showing off a new product or sharing video testimonials from happy customers.

But adding video to email has never been easy. Since most email service providers don’t display embedded video in email, most marketers work around this using GIFs or static images, then linking out to the video itself.

The ability to play a video directly from an email has been on email marketers’ wishlists for a long time… and now it’s (finally!) becoming a reality.

Adding video to your emails just got easier

Apple’s iOS 10 release includes support for video in email for Apple clients. As a result, Movable Ink is excited to offer the option of using HTML 5 Video in your email campaign.

So how does it work?

On Apple’s desktop application and iPads, videos will play directly in an email. According to Litmus, iOS Mail on iPad displays a play button on the video content. The video will play when your subscriber hits the button in the body of the email, and will continue playing even as they scroll through the message. Pretty cool, huh?

Video in email is currently supported by iOS Mail, Apple Mail on Desktop and Outlook.com.

If you’re using Movable Ink, you can look at your company-specific analytics to find out what percentage of your subscribers can view video in email.

And if you have subscribers who can’t view video in email? Movable Ink can automatically detect devices that don’t support video and instead show an animated GIF as a fallback. If the device doesn’t support a GIF, the fallback will be a static image.

Now that it’s easier than ever to add video to your email campaigns, here are a few ideas you can use to take advantage of it.

3 ways to use video in your emails

Testimonial video

When to use it: When you want to build trust and show the benefits of your product or service. Anyone can use testimonial videos!

Aim for videos about two minutes or less in length that speak directly to the benefits of your product or service, like the video featured here from Swipely. Storytelling is key for testimonials, so focus on your customer’s desire, challenge and how your company provided a solution. Learn more about creating effective video testimonials in this post from Wistia.

Product promotion video

When to use it: Running a limited-time sale? Announcing a new product? A video is the perfect compliment for time-sensitive, product-related emails, driving high engagement rates.

How to do it: Use a product promotion video to illustrate how your product is used or to simply add a fun, engaging element to your emails. When Pet Supplies Plus used a video in their email campaign to promote a coupon for cat litter, they saw total open rates of 84.8%, nearly doubling their typical open rates and making this campaign one of their most successful ones to date.

How-to video

When to use it: If your product requires your customer to log in and set up an account, or if you just want to give your customers pointers on using your product to get them up and running faster, video tutorials make it easier.

How to do it: Include your how-to video in your email onboarding series so customers can refer back to it whenever they need it. Consider including video shortcuts so people can jump to the exact topic they have questions about, like Shopify does in their video tutorials.

Add video to your emails today

There’s no denying that visual content – particularly video – delivers sky-high email engagement. Use one of these ideas in your next email campaign to test out videos on your audience. Want to learn more about how you can start sending videos in your emails? Here’s how building and testing emails with videos works with Movable Ink.

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