Video in Email: The Future of Business Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the one proven marketing strategy that many small businesses overlook. It’s cheap, accessible and, with the growth of Social Media, a very effective way to share your message with your customers and their social circles. All of the top email marketing platforms now integrate tools that allow you to share your messages over social media networks. This provides the pinnacle opportunity for social amplification on every email you send. Considering people are more receptive to recommendations offered by those they know, building social sharing into your email marketing campaigns has tremendous value and potential for the growth of your business.

With all of these benefits, why would any business not include email in their marketing strategy? It can’t be the cost, email marketing is very affordable. Vertical Response starts at $10.00 a month, Get Response and Constant Contact are competitive at $15.00 a month and Mail Chimp offers a free plan. So for any business, no matter how small, cost should not be a legitimate barrier to beginning an email marketing campaign.

It’s also not the technology; email campaigns can be created and scheduled in minutes with the click of the mouse. Most of the options we just mentioned offer user friendly interfaces with plenty of templates to choose from. Wagering a guess, the resistance to email marketing adoption is mose closely related to the time it takes to sit down and create the content, the living, breathing part of your email marketing campaign. Putting your thoughts and ideas into one cohesive message can be a daunting task for some.

Enter the Opportunity and Potential of Video in Emails.

Video imbedded inside of emails is not a new idea, but has not been as easily achieved in the past. The security dangers created by the need for video plugins and the content filtering tendencies of various email providers have prevented serious attempts at including video imbeds within the email itself. However, something happened in 2012 that makes video emails a real possibility. What changed? HTML 5.

The implementation of HTML 5 among multiple email clients and providers has made the inclusion of video directly within an email extremely safe, easy and universally adoptable. Although video imbedding is not yet available to the masses, the technology exists and there is definitely potential in such a product or service. Video emails will probably be within the reach of wider spread markets in the very near future. That could be a boon to those businesses that are not currently using emails to connect with target audiences.

It’s much easier to sit in front of a camera and tell people what you want them to know rather than sitting in front of a keyboard and typing out a message.  Emails that tmay take countless minutes or even hours to create can literally be recorded in a minute or two using video. Plus, video inherently delivers a more personable message as opposed to words on a page from a faceless sender. 

Thanks to smartphones, video creation and sharing is commonplace today.  Advancing the technology to share video communications within emails is on the forefront of marketing tactics and knocking loudly at the door. Add the fact that people love to share video on their favorite social networks (Note: Instagram now does video) and the potential of video in email; we could be playing witness to the revolutionizing of the email marketing industry and quite possibly the spark to light thousands of small businesses across the world at once.