Spice Up Your Email Marketing with Links and Videos

Are the people that make up your subscriber list bored out of their minds? Are your open rates suffering? Would your subscribers rather watch the latest kitten video that’s being passed around on Facebook than read your latest email marketing message? If so, it’s time to spice things up. To get a little saucy with your email subscribers, you don’t need to start cussing like a sailor and you definitely don’t need to start posting nude photos. While those gimmicks can get you noticed, they’re not very good ways to keep your audience engaged. Instead, to highlight your email marketing messages against all competitors, use the following email marketing tips, which make use of two elements – links and video – which are considered bait for those with discerning eyes and the shortest of attention spans.

Point to Links and Videos in the Subject Line

The subject lines you choose to send out to your subscribers can make or break your email marketing efforts. Consider the following subject line:

Earn $1000 in 30 Days with this One Simple Trick

That subject line is ok. It’s specific, it contains immediacy and it seems like it would be fairly enticing to anyone who could use a cool grand in the span of a single month. A good way to dress that subject line up is to alert your readers that there is an important link inside. However, you must take care. Many emails contain links and most of those emails and the links they contain are considered spam. That’s not to say that your links are spam, but you must be careful when communicating your email marketing links to your subscribers so that you don’t come across that way.

A good way to alert your subscribers that there is a link inside the email is to use brackets along with an enticer, such as [Instant Access] or [Instant Access Inside]. So, your subject line will now look like this:

Earn $1000 in 30 Days with this One Simple Trick [Instant Access Inside]

Get creative with your link descriptions. Let your subscribers know what your links do and where they lead without giving away the whole enchilada in the subject line. Remember, your subject lines should give hints as to your email contents, but they should leave your subscribers wanting just a little bit more, thus enticing them to open and read what you’ve sent.

Include Videos for Improved Effect

Nothing engages quite like video and you are encouraged to send videos with many of the email marketing messages you send. It’s never a good idea to send video with every message. That’s a good way to become pigeonholed or predictable. Soon your subscribers may find themselves saying with abject boredom in their voices, “Oh, good, yet another video.” That’s usually said right before they click delete without even bothering to open your emails at all.

Videos should be relevant, high-quality and should match the email marketing message you’re sending out. Most importantly, and one of the greatest email marketing tips you could ever hear is this: Make sure the videos – and all other content – perfectly matches what your subscribers want.

You are then urged to alert your subscribers to your videos by including a tag in the subject line, just like you did with links in one of the email marketing tips above.

A subject line for an email that includes a video might read:

Earn $1000 in 30 Days with this One Simple Trick [Video]

That’s really all you have to do. If your subject line is click-worthy, letting your subscribers know that there is an accompanying video will super-charge the click-attraction, thus leading to more opens and reads.

Again, be creative and use interesting tags to alert your email marketing subscribers that there is a relevant video waiting for them. Examples include:

[Watch the Video], [Must-See Video], [Don’t Miss the Vid!]

Or use the entire subject line to alert subscribers to your video, such as:

Must-See Video –  How to Earn $1000 in 30 Days with One Simple Trick

Of course, subject line length will always be an issue, but play with these email marketing tips, stretch your creativity and test, test, test your results.

The Emails Themselves

Right now you might be wondering what to actually put in the emails themselves. Well, once you have the subject line mastered, your job is half-way done. If you can get your readers to open your emails, all you need to do is keep the engagement going with relevant copy, links and video.

Keep the copy short, always speak to the reader directly and let the person know that you feel their pain. Let them know that you have the solution to their pain and that the solution lies just beyond the link or at the end of a relevant video.

The fact is, email marketing isn’t difficult. You now have several email marketing tips to improve your opens, reads and click-throughs. As long as you understand your subscribers and consistently give them what they want, your list will grow and your audience will begin to actually look forward to every message you send. That’s how you convert a list to money, no matter what you happen to be selling.

Image Source: JASE Group LLC on Flickr