How to Use Videos to Build Your B2B Email Marketing Strategy

By now, most businesses understand that combining email marketing with content marketing can make for a strong and effective B2B strategy. Email remains the undefeated champion of outreach channels, and if you add high-quality video production into the mix, you have the perfect formula for increasing your outreach strategy’s conversion rates.

The thing is, creating an effective and sustainable strategy that utilizes and maximizes all those elements is not easy. It takes a bit of know-how and nuance to make B2B email strategies that get the most out of your B2B video content and deliver the returns your company expects.

So, to help with that, we’ve put together this piece to guide you through the ins and outs of an effective B2B video email strategy and teach you some of the most important aspects you should consider from the get-go.

Why Should You Use Videos in B2B Email Marketing?

Video emails are one of the most successful types of outreach communication at your company’s disposal. Their appeal lies in that the video hooks and engages the recipient almost instantly. Given that 90% of content marketers affirm that email engagement is the top metric they track to measure content performance, adding video only makes sense, benefits-wise.

It’s a synergy that’s only more pronounced in a B2B setup. After all, who would prefer reading a dense text about the crucial points of a report to watching a video conveying and highlighting the same data in a visually compelling way?

Beyond base appeal and practicality, video emailing also saves time to the senders and the receivers alike. You get to deliver your message effectively and take up less time from your corporate counterparts who will appreciate the consideration and be more inclined to listen and take action. 

5 Ways to Improve Your B2B Video Email Campaigns

So, you have your B2B email list, a great video that suits the email campaign goals you have in mind. It’s time to start sending those emails and watching those leads start raining, right? Well, hold up there!

Now, do keep in mind there are many video styles you can leverage for your B2B email strategy. But it is important to reinforce the point that not every video will perform equally well in every setup, and your piece should be designed to synergize effectively with your email campaign goals.

While there are no set rules for designing and tweaking your B2B email marketing campaign, there are some crucial touchpoints that can significantly impact the effectiveness of your video email strategy. Follow these guidelines to improve your B2B email marketing campaign.

1. Segment your audience to customize videos.

Segmentation is one of the most important aspects of any email marketing campaign. It essentially involves dividing your leads or subscribers’ list into subsections according to different criteria so that you can send relevant content to each of them. Nobody likes to receive a pitch email clearly meant for a separate department in your company, no matter how friendly it is.

You can segment your audience by sorting your leads according to their position or job title within the company. You can also divide them by department, industry, or number of employees. Essentially, every piece of data that you fill in can narrow down your scope and help you target exactly the type of person you’d want to open your email and watch your video.

Each of those segments will have its own nuanced characteristics, which you can also use to customize your video and email further and improve their overall projected effectiveness.

In the next step, it's important to gather the email addresses of each segment and divide them again. This time, make sure to have a valid email address for each recipient to avoid any confusion during the email marketing campaign.

2. Deliver videos that match your email strategy goals.

Once you have segmented your audience, you need to choose the kind of video you will deliver in your emails, and the best way to choose right is to match your content to your email campaign. Here are some of the most popular ones to get you started:

• Use testimonial videos to influence buying decisions: These videos are perfect to showcase your company’s reliability, value, and trustworthiness to other businesses. Having real, happy, and satisfied clients doing the talking for you can provide social proof, build your case, and even present your pitch in a subtle way that doesn’t come through as a hard sale.
• Choose demo and product videos to highlight your value: Product and demo videos are all about showcasing your product or service’s key value propositions while communicating how they work in a practical sense. They can be particularly effective in B2B sales as they let you deliver a lot of vital info quickly and effectively right after your email piqued a recipient’s interest.
• Add explainer videos to convey complex information: B2B communications tend to be chock-full intricate data and statistics that, however relevant, can be a hassle to get through. Few people would like to sit through an entire email filled with that type of info, but explainer videos can do the heavy lifting for you, summarizing the key insights and takeaways you want your readers to walk away with in a short amount of time. 

3. Focus on subject lines.

More often than not, the subject line of an email is what determines whether it gets opened. This is the first element that your target audience will see, so you need to make a good first impression and pique their interest!

Your subject line needs to be enticing enough to make people want to open your email. So, try including the word "video," which has proven time and again to increase open rates. In fact, it is one of the reasons why videos and email strategies pair so well together, as most people will be at least a bit curious to check out a video that gets into their inboxes.

As for the more technical aspects on subject lines, avoid spam words such as “Open Now!" and aim for 40 to 45 characters, because your subject line should be short, ideally no longer than seven words. You can even experiment a little and include an emoji to make it more appealing, but that would depend more on the overall tone of your company’s branding and what you are going for with your strategy.

4. Introduce your core message right away.

While the video will be the cornerstone of your email, your primary goal should be to get your message across in any way that works. It should be the first thing your audience sees when they open your email, so it’s best to start your email by immediately introducing the core of your message as briefly as possible and then place your video right after it.

By putting your message first, you have the opportunity to prime your audience for your video and frame how they might receive it once they watch. This will ultimately reduce drop-off rates, make for a more enjoyable experience for the viewer, and translate into a more effective strategy overall. 

5. Avoid embedding and autoplay.

While embedding your video within the email might seem preferable to attaching an image or gif that takes recipients where they can watch your video, know that the biggest email clients do not support HTML5, which you’d need to even view the content.

By the same token, autoplay might sound like a great resource to get your recipients immediately watching your video. However, users access their emails while on the go, from their phones or tablets, and even at the office, few would appreciate opening an email that suddenly starts playing with sound.

Our advice? Create a high-quality image that simulates a video player, attach it to your email, and link it so that whenever people press play, they are brought to wherever your video is embedded. There, you should have your video ready on autoplay because the recipient already demonstrated their readiness to watch by clicking.

Boost B2B Email Marketing with Videos

The main goal of B2B email marketing is to familiarize other businesses with your brand so that you can convert them into clients, and using video to improve your email campaign is one of the most effective ways to do that.

Hopefully, this piece has given you enough inspiration to start including video content in your emails. Don’t take out word for it; try it, start reaping the benefits, and see the results for yourself.