Using video is hands-down the best way to boost the engagement and click-through rates of your emails. The majority of marketers rate video-use as the best ROI, and studies suggest that emails with video thumbnails get 40% more engagement than emails without video. In addition to being more effective and efficient at communicating information, video also drives your contacts to spend more time with your emails and be more receptive to your Calls to Action.
An important piece to making sure that your videos reach your contacts is making your emails visually impressive and prominently displaying your video link. In our experience, embedding your video link into a clickable thumbnail is the best way to improve click-through rate. Below I'll be showing you how to embed a video thumbnail into your email to increase your open rate.
To start, you'll need your video's URL. For the URL of a DC100 video, simply navigate to the "videos" section under the "my library" tab.
Once you're in your video library, hover over the video and click on the "embed" icon.
On the new window that comes up, you'll be using the bottom of the two links.
Once you have the URL of the video you'd like to display, your next step will be to download a copy of your videos thumbnail. This can be done a few different ways.
For PCs (Vista or later), I recommend using the Snipping Tool.
Open Snipping Tool
Set mode to Rectangular Snip
Click New
Carefully drag your cursor diagonally from corner-to-corner
Save your snip as a new file
For Macs:
Press Shift-Command-4
Carefully drag your cursor diagonally from corner-to-corner
After you release your mouse or trackpad button, find the screenshot on your desktop
If neither of these work, there are websites that will download your video's thumbnail for free, such as thumbnailsave.com.
Once your thumbnail is saved you'll be ready to start building your email. Start composing your email and copy your thumbnail screenshot into the body of the email. It's important that the thumbnail is copied to the body of the email, and not simply an attachment. Once pasted into the email, highlight the thumbnail and click "insert link". On Outlook, you can use the button "insert pictures inline".
NOTE: On Outlook for desktop Macs, this function doesn't exist. You can circumvent this by using the browser-based version of Outlook.
Paste your video's URL the appropriate box, save, and you should be set! From there, compose the rest of your email. In my experience, having the video in the middle of the email is quite effective. Compared to sharing a link, you'll find a much higher click-through rate employing this method.
If you have any issues with this, please feel welcome to reach out to me directly at [email protected]