In 2020, many businesses have seen a dramatic shift in their operations virtually overnight as their workers, frontages and customers adhered to lockdown and public health restrictions worldwide. Regardless of value propositions or business models, it’s a time that businesses can actually use to cultivate customer relationships for everything from helpful communications and uplifting check-ins through to practical updates and user-friendly purchasing options. Subsequently how businesses stay connected is the point of difference and interestingly, data during the global lockdown period shows a truly unexpected pivot in consumer behaviour amidst the backdrop of a rapidly changing world.
Building Meaningful and Memorable Customer Connections
When it comes to commercial growth and connectivity, email activity has actually surged in a surprising way. Despite collective financial loss whether it’s furlough or long-term uncertainty, more customers are actually responding to business emails since COVID-19 began. How do we know this? Forbes reports that while there’s more business outreach emails than ever, there’s actually a higher customer open rate than pre-pandemic. In fact, statistics from Iterable show that email open-rates and click-throughs increased by 21% and 14% respectively in March 2020. Further to this, they measured an additional 8.5% increase in purchases inferred from email over March-April 2020!
Diversify Your Customer Engagement Strategy
If you’re a business owner or marketing professional, now is the time to implement a diversified customer engagement strategy and email with the added features of video is the strong place to start. Combined with the above surge in email opening rates, Samson Haileyesus aptly identifies the value in video, “Videos give companies a platform to talk about their business, product, or service in a way that makes the customer feel at ease.” It makes sense that if your customer can neither visit your premises nor have ‘normal’ business experiences that they discover your business in new ways. Moreover, a mammoth proportion of time spent online involves video. A recent report from Zenith actually projected that by 2021 the average person will watch 100 minutes of online video every day. Done well, businesses can use video to incept a value-adding campaign that genuinely nurtures the customer experience -- particularly important if your business is currently shuttered -- and achieves click-throughs, not to mention piquing their interest with the format itself.
Overall, the design component of video is much more attractive than even the most inspired images, with its user-friendly features enhancing your brand in nuanced, memorable ways. The other inherently value-adding characteristic of video is how functional it is as a dynamic connecting force with both prospective and existing customers. Recall value is another qualitative and quantitative metric here with Sugandha Bansal saying, “Great video content can give your business an exponential growth with massive conversion and ROI.”
Where To Start With Video In Email Marketing?
Not sure exactly where to start? Well, experienced video marketers One Productions have shared this infographic so you can get started with Video In Email Marketing. With this graphic, you’ll be ready to start using video for high-level emails that incorporate a huge range of areas including:
- How To’s
- Product demonstrations
- Testimonials
- Company culture
- High-level business messages like recorded press releases, and,
- Explainers
This foundation resource provides you with the 101 to expand your marketing offerings and capture attention -- just don’t forget to tailor to your different customer segments.
