New Email Marketing Techniques Look to Stand Out From the Crowd

CEO of Vidyard, Michael Litt, authors an article on Marketing Land titled, “It’s Time to Get Personal with Email” disclosing the newest ways companies have enhanced their email marketing campaigns.

Litt discusses two ways in which marketers are making more of an impact. The first is incorporating video into their email marketing efforts. A study from Marketo and ClearFit (client) found that their emails using video for a direct call to action had a 53% higher click-to-open rate than emails without. Experian found that open rates increased to 13% (from seven-percent) when the word “video” appeared in the subject line.

Video has impacted the digital world as a whole, so why not bring it to direct email marketing as well?

The second tactic Litt discusses is personalization. I remember being in awe as a kid when my parents would get a direct mail piece that had their name stamped on it. Later to discover that in reality, the simple personalization wasn’t quite as authentic as I had assumed it to be, albeit, I was still impressed. Marketers are revamping that personalization and wrapping it into their emails.

Research from VentureBeat Insights states that more than 90% of marketers see an increase in their open and click-thru-rates when some form of personalization is used in their email marketing.

Litt then leads advertisers to do the seemingly obvious and combine these two methods. Genius, right? Lenovo, a computer manufacturing company, sent out a holiday greeting video to its customers last December including the recipient’s name on a sign by the gingerbread house in the video’s opening screen. In Litt’s own words, “Who wouldn’t open that?” The results showed that he wasn’t alone in that thought. “Seven times as many people clicked through to the personalized video compared with others that weren’t personalized.”

Not only have personalized and video emails shown higher open and click-thru-rates. Act-On found that viewers spent 62% more time than average on the campaign landing page.