Videos in email? Yes, please.

How two customers increased audience engagement with videos in their email campaigns.

You know how it’s fabulous to celebrate your birthday for your entire birth month? (Is that just me?) We feel the same way about celebrating the new year: The month of January is meant for resolution and reinvention. Whether at home or at work, it’s time to set new goals and pave the way for a smarter 2011.

If you aspire to refresh your email marketing efforts this year, resolve to add video content to your emails. Video is a personal, interactive addition to your campaign strategy, and it lends your campaign an extra boost of expertise — you can show off a new product, highlight the happenings at a recent company event or give a virtual tour of your store or office space. Further, you’ll be able to track who clicks to watch your video, and then you can follow up accordingly.

Take a look at this fantastic email from Asking Matters, a team of fundraising experts in New York who help their members effectively ask for donations and funds. The campaign received a strong 20% click-through rate, and the video was its most popular link by far. They’ve extended the conversational tone of their email in a video of the same ilk, and they’ve included friends and colleagues in the conversation. Asking Matters also got extra traction out of the video by posting it on their blog with a full list of resolutions gathered.

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You may have noticed that Asking Matter’s video was not embedded directly in the email. Mail servers aren’t fans of bulky videos, and many servers will often outright block an email that contains an embedded video clip. Keep in mind, too, that not all recipients will have the same video player at their disposal. And an embedded video clip cannot feasibly be tracked.

Instead of embedding the video in your email, a better bet is to post your video online — on YouTube, Vimeo or your company’s website — and link your recipients to it. Take a screenshot of your video, save it as a jpeg or gif and add it to a ‘your image here’ placeholder in Emma. Then, link that image to the video clip.

Here’s another great example from Blue Ocean Ideas out of Towson, MD. They help emerging and enduring brands design their logos and messages, build their websites and engage with their social networks. What do we find so engaging about this video campaign? It’s simply designed and allows their subscribers to better get to know co-founders Greg and Brody. And their subscribers must be interested: This video received a whopping 60% click-through rate, a 45% increase in clicks as compared to their fall newsletter.

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What if you’d rather not post your video on your website or a public video site? Emma’s document library lets you upload Quicktime videos, MPEGs, Flash movies, WAV files and more, and then you can link to them right from your campaign.

Ready to try your hand at adding video to your email campaign? Keep these recommendations in mind:

• Choose a video format that’s compatible most everywhere, or consider offering a few different formats.
• Post your video online or upload it to your document library in Emma rather than embedding it in the email itself.
• Center a special campaign around your video content, or place your video in the sidebar of a regular monthly newsletter.
• Remember to check your response numbers, and think about the most appropriate way to follow up with video viewers. You might create a link-based trigger that automatically sends to folks who clicked to view the video.
• Get the most mileage out of your video by cross-promoting it on your blog or Facebook page.

If you’ve added videos to your email campaigns in the past, tell us about them. Or, grab the Online Version of your campaign and share it with us in the comments below.