The data on digital video has proven at least one thing: consumers dig it. Still the fastest growing ad format, video is definitely more popular than many other formats.
Now email marketers are getting in on the act. According to the 2016 Email Marketing Insights Study, 22.5 percent of marketing professionals plan to use video this year.
Liveclicker, a company that offers video commerce solutions for retailers as well as email services, has more information. The firm analyzed 2,500 campaigns sent by its clients in the year leading up to June, 2016.
What did Livelicker discover? For starters, that the most common way for email marketers to include video in email messages was by sending animated GIFs.
“Forty six percent of the campaigns studied used silent animations to embed video content,” reports eMarketer. “But almost as many offered full-screen video (44 percent), including 33 percent of campaigns that required two clicks for playback. Only 11 percent had full-screen video with playback available after just one click. And only 8 percent placed the video inline in the email.”
A poll from Email on Acid showed that nearly a quarter of U.S. marketing practitioners said they planned to add HTML 5 video to their email campaigns. One boon to help the trend is this: Apple’s recent iOS 10 release supports video in email.
Email marketing may be the oldest form of digital advertising, but it continues to offer strong ROI and still enjoys favor among many U.S. consumers.
“Email is about as old-school as digital marketing gets,” notes eMarketer, but (still enjoys) high acquisition and retention rates, particularly for small- and medium-sized business. About four-fifths of these professionals said email marketing helps contribute to this outcome over other tactics from organic search to social media.”
