How Animated Explainer Videos Can Boost Email Open Rates

Email marketing has been a staple of online marketing campaigns for a long, long time now. That’s for good reason—despite seeming a bit old-fashioned, emails are still a great, effective way to reach a lot of people in one of the most direct ways possible.

With so many things fighting for people’s attention, including lots of emails inundating people’s inboxes, it can take a lot to stand out from the crowd, and create one of the few emails that get opened rather than deleted right away. That means you’ve got to spice up your email marketing approach—and that’s where animated explainer videos can step in, help improve email open rates, and take your marketing campaign to the next level. In this article, we’ll explore what makes animated explainer videos so great, break down how to improve email open rates, and discuss how to effectively use animation in emails so that your marketing email campaigns take off and you improve email open rates.

As we mentioned, email marketing is tried and true, and for good reason, because it can reach so many people all at once, but it’s also a bit old and needs some revitalizing to feel fresh and modern. That’s where an animated explainer video can come in and help reinvigorate your email marketing campaign and really make it pop.

Rather than simply throwing a massive wall of text at your prospective audience, why not let an explainer video share the message for you? After all, that’s what an explainer video does: it distills a complex idea, or set of ideas into a digestible, short video to help explain a message for audiences—whether it’s explaining a political message, explaining a sociological issue, tackling a tricky controversy, or even pitching a brand.

Those are just a few examples of what you can do with explainer videos.

Around 64% of potential customers are more likely to make purchases after watching a video, rather than reading about a product, and marketers cite that by using an animated video in your marketing email campaigns, you can boost click-through rates by up to a whopping 300%.

Using video in a medium that is often considered to be so text-heavy is a great way to differentiate yourself in the market. An animated explainer video can not only help break up long walls of text, but it’s also a good way to help transition from one topic to the next if your email has a wider focus instead of one singular message.

Using animated explainer videos, and video email marketing, in general, is another great way to ensure that you can improve email open rates. Your content will be unique and engaging and people will look forward to opening your emails as well as wanting to find out what you have to say next. Ultimately, that’s what you want: customer and brand loyalty.

Not only will your customers be more willing to open emails from you, and watch your animated explainer videos as well as buy your products, but they’ll also become loyal to your product and your message, acting as brand ambassadors. This is another reason why explainer videos can be so great for your email marketing campaigns. It’s much easier to get someone to watch a quick 30 second or one-minute long video than it is to get them to read a massive wall of text about a product. It feels much more genuine, and less like people are being lectured at or nakedly and unashamedly sold something.

 

Animation in Emails Promotes Connection

Sending emails feels personal. You’re invited into someone’s inbox, and it feels like a conversation. In that conversation, you can adopt the usual tactics of product videos like addressing potential problems customers may have and offering your products as solutions.

Beyond the traditional things video brings to the table, email has a few advantages that make it feel more personal. You can address people by name and serve them personalized content based on what ads, blog posts, and other content they’ve interacted with. When you combine sincere copy with a video that’s well-done and on the theme, people feel like you understand them. That goes a long way to establishing and building a personal relationship with your customer. When customers feel those personal connections, it makes them feel all the more like they’re being catered to, and this video, this solution—and by extension—this product is just for them.

 

Video email marketing is great for SEO

Yep. You read that right. Another huge advantage to video is that it has the potential to absolutely explode in popularity, which means it’s great for searchability, and visibility—much more so than traditional email marketing. There’s a reason that you see people talking about video marketing campaigns and brilliant explainer videos, much more so than you do about the marketing copy in the weekly newsletter from their local pharmacy. You even probably know yourself, having worked on countless newsletters and having seen the clickthrough rates: if you could feature videos on certain products, events, announcements, etc., the clickthrough and open rates would undoubtedly skyrocket, compared to simple links or text articles.

For that extra-personal touch, you could also consider using testimonials and spice up actual customer testimonials with flashy animated quotes to get them to feel more involved and engaged with your brand and product to further drive customer loyalty and engagement.

 

Here are some quick tips to help integrate video into your email marketing:

 

1. Put the Word “Video” in the Subject Line

Presumably, you won’t be using video email marketing in all of your marketing campaigns, and email blasts out to customers, so it’s a good idea to distinguish when your emails will feature video. This can incentivize people to open them up—since most emails often don’t feature video.

Maybe you’re presenting to customers a new product, so you want your subject line to look something like “Check Out Our New and Improved Cat Litter! (Video)”

Or, say you’re trying to teach prospective clients about sales techniques, and you want to wow them with your sales know-how. Not only do people often learn better via video, but it can be great to get them to click on something like “Learn These New Sales Techniques! (Video).”

 

2. Avoid Autoplay

As much as animated explainer videos are great and can be an amazing tool to help improve email open rates, autoplaying videos when they’re embedded in an email can be incredibly annoying—so avoid using them. People will quickly turn it off if they aren’t given the option to watch a video at their own speed.

 

3. Keep The Videos Short

These are explainer videos, which generally tend to be only a minute or so long, but keep in mind that most people are busy and short on time so you don’t want to impose. For most people, checking their email is a hassle, and you need to show that you respect people’s time. Not to mention, if you keep your videos short it allows for the possibility of a series of videos, and repeated viewers/returning viewers. This in turn means a greater chance of boosting email open rates.

 

4. Use a Video to Break Up Text

Don’t forget that you don’t necessarily have to just send a video email or just a text email when you’re considering how to format your marketing email blasts. Use the two together, in harmony, to help complement each other. Use text when it makes sense to use text, and use video to help explain things, or when there’s simply too much text to try to keep people’s attention.

We’ve talked a bit about how to actually use email marketing videos, and how to improve email open rates via animated explainer videos. Let’s explore animated explainer videos, briefly, and hopefully, you’ll really understand how great using animation in emails can be and how they can take your email open rates to the next level.

 

How Do Animated Explainer Videos Work?

Quite simply, animated explainer videos are created to help explain things in the most straight-forward, dynamic way possible, and can be used for many different purposes.

Generally speaking, animated explainer videos distill the most important things that you need to say into an easy-to-digest, well-animated, short video that can be easily shared and viewed by many people.

Let’s take a look at some types of animated explainer videos, and explore how they can be useful for you, and how they can improve your email open rates.

Different Types of Explainer Videos

Are you launching a new brand or introducing a brand to a new audience? Or possibly just re-focusing your brand? Then an animated brand video is for you: it tells people the story of your brand, and sets apart your brand from others, identifying what makes your brand unique, and magnifies your selling points. Think of it as a sales pitch for your brand.

Do you have a new product to launch? Then you want a product explainer video. Often, product videos will identify a problem that their potential customers have, and using slick animation and examples such as facts, expert studies, and testimonials, to explain how great their product is.

Do you need to tackle a tough, controversial subject, or need help figuring out how to deal with HR-related concerns in the workplace? Then you might need an animated PR video, which can help when you need to tackle intricate, tough subjects that maybe need more nuance and intricate thought than an email can allow—and you can also avoid the sticky situation of text being misinterpreted via email.

Finally, are you trying to wow your sales team with a new sales technique, or report the latest numbers to your higher-ups? Then consider an animated sales video so you don’t have to report all of those numbers in a boring, dry way. Mix things up with an animated explainer video that can not only breathe life into those numbers but also explain why they’re so important.

At the end of the day, animated explainer videos can be a great tool to help boost email open rates because they help break up the monotony of text-heavy email threads, retain people’s attention, and encourage people to share those eye-catching videos.

There are a lot of uses for animated explainer videos, but at the end of the day, they generally boil down to trying to present and explain information in the most engaging, simple way possible for people to consume. They’re snappy, fun, and easy to follow.

That being said, they’re a massive undertaking to produce, and, if you’re not an expert, or you’re starting from scratch, they can be a lot of work. You have to worry about things like storyboarding out your ideas, writing and editing a script, actually animating your video, possibly learning animations styles, editing your video, and possibly learning how to edit it, as well as narrating your video, and other unforeseen production costs. Of course, you could do this yourself, but it’s an expensive, time-consuming task, and everyone is busy—yourself included. You need this project done last week.

At Explainify, we get it. We’re the experts when it comes to making award-winning animated explainer videos. Get in touch with us and we can work with you—you can be as hands-on, or as hands-off with the entire process of creating an animated explainer video as you need to be. Then you can flex all of those great skills you learned to integrate that awesome new explainer video into your video email marketing campaign.

Ready to get started on your explainer video? Get in touch and let’s work together!