Entire companies — and even industries — have been built on the backs of successful email marketing campaigns. Knowing how to work the inbox game is an invaluable skill, one that all of us can constantly be tweaking and updating our approach to get the most out of our efforts.
With that said, we’re all creatures of habit. Find something that works and stick with it, that’s long been the name of the game. So long as you’re still seeing growth, it seems ludicrous to switch things up and mess with the recipe, right? The reality is that no matter your marketing situation and lead generation, anyone working with prospecting can stand to implement some new ideas into their repertoire.
After all, email prospecting is all about grabbing attention and maintaining that focus. If you lean on the same tactics over and over again, you’re bound to eventually run the risk of losing that ability to grab attention and quickly be playing catch-up in trying to determine how to retain your prospect funnel numbers.
Video is a great way to add a whole lot of creativity into one message and spice up your prospecting. It transcends the idea of tactics to encompass an entire new subsection of prospecting that can greatly benefit your efforts. The numbers serve to back this idea up: sales reps that rely on video as a facet of their prospecting and sales emails see open rates that are over five times larger than those that don’t, and are additionally generating eight times higher open-to-reply rates than their peers.
You might be thinking, “Sure, that sounds great, but the name of the game is volume.” Maybe there’s a voice inside saying something like, “Video is awesome, I interact with it everyday. But I just don’t have the time or know-how to make that kind of pivot right now”. Both are valid concerns, but can be mitigated with a few user-friendly approaches.
Realistically, video is a remarkably creative platform, a blank canvas that you could probably take thousands of different directions. Let’s focus on a few key concepts to get you started on the path towards an integrated video email prospecting.
The Many Paths of Video in Email
Depending on your goals in your email campaign, there are a number of different directions you can go to direct your email prospecting. Each pathway is fixated on ideas of the prospecting cycle versus relationship-building and sales to existing customers.
If you’re heading down a strictly prospecting path, you’re likely to take an approach that hones in on cold prospecting methods first, with a general follow-up and then an account-based sales method to round everything out. For those that are looking to build on preexisting relationships, a relationship-building method that looks first at sharing basic marketing content through email, video centered around content from the web and then follow-up emails that have simple hello’s are a way of rounding everything out.
Finally, for those established connections that go way back, it’s never a bad time to try to make a sale. Send out some video content of brief product demos, followed by touching base with your customers. You can then perform some low-touch sales maneuvers that are tech-driven with video, and also try to breathe life back into your accounts that have gone cold using video email.
These are all pathways to consider when approaching video in sales and prospecting emails. Let’s turn our attention to dive a bit deeper into each of these three primary processes, shall we?
Transforming the Prospecting Email Path
Let’s start with what can feel like the toughest route of all: prospecting emails. When heading down this cold, dark path, all you’re hoping to find is the glimmer of light from a new lead at the end of the tunnel. And how does that light find its way to you? By standing out in what is likely to be a very crowded inbox. For business and sales development reps, the three stops on the path towards new leads that can be enhanced with video are found in cold prospecting emails, first contact follow-up, and when taking an account-based sales method into consideration.
How do you use video to augment this experience? What you need to remember is that you’re attempting to capture an audience that may not be all that familiar with your company, with your product line or with you. With that in mind, you need to capture their attention. You can do this by something as simple as including “video” in the email subject line, coupled with a thumbnail of the video in the email body. You can also explore embedding video links in email through the thumbnail to generate greater click-through.
You also need to sell the reader on who you are. You want to appear as a credible source, so reps should provide reason for engagement. Perhaps your video can include footage of the rep themselves to attach a personal face to the engagement, and consider not trying to push any sales at all in the video. This should be informative and not seem like pandering. On that same note, personalization can go a long way towards building a relationship. Your future customers will be shocked to open a video in an email and hear their name referenced in the video. You can do this by making 90% of the video generalized, but by including an intro edit that only takes minutes to produce but should prove worth the short time.
So to recap: in your prospecting, include ‘video’ in the title. Embed a thumbnail of the video, make the content personal, give viewers a name and face to associate with it, make it about them and don’t go too heavy on the selling by keeping it informative and to their needs.
Enhancing Relationships with Video Email
When you already have your leads pinned down and you’re trying to build off them and start generating sales, that’s when it’s time to make use of video to remind customers of your presence and get them interested in specific products directed towards their needs. In order to do this, you can send video emails that make use of pre-existing marketing content on the web from your company, share video marketing content designated towards their needs, or simply reach out and say, ‘Hey’.
If this is your path, make sure your video does the following: first, you want the content to be incredibly relevant to their needs. Your reps will need to do background, revisit communications and company info to determine what exactly matches up between your products and their needs.
You have to continue an approachable, friendly approach. Don’t suddenly turn into a sales hawk; try to start up a conversation. Continue to educate them and build a sort of alliance between your company and their brand. Demonstrate how, together with your product, they’ll start benefiting in ways that help everyone out. And last, but definitely not least, provide a specific and straightforward way for them to move to the next stage of purchase through a call-to-action.
Videos to Make the Sales Continue
When you’re trying to bounce back to an existing or former customer, this is when video in your sales email can make all the difference. Whether you’re sending out demos of new products that are tailored towards their needs, or trying to simply revive an account that has since gone cold, video can be just what you need to break through.
Just as before, remind customers in your video how, together with your company, you can achieve stronger growth than ever. If there was a particularly successful venture that you’re aware of in the past, remind them of it. Keep notes and include them in videos; don’t hesitate to bring up glowing comments they’ve mentioned in the past about your products. Stay confident in the video, but don’t go overboard with it. Retain the personal touch by maintaining the same faces and voices in the video, or introduce a new rep if there has been a change. Use first names, leverage everything about your relationship within the video. It’ll signal that you’re still thinking about their needs as a business and are devoting your time and assets to those needs.
A simple selfie-style recording with a script like, “Hey so-and-so, we just launched a new product this month and I think you’ll find that it touches on a lot of the needs that you expressed wanting in a new product from our previous conversations. I included a quick demo that follows, as always feel free to reach out. Hope all is well!” can do the trick. Deliver the demo, and after the demo have a call-to-action for them to take. This formula doesn’t take much time at all, not much more than a phone call to leave a voicemail would, but it yields results.
If your marketing team is taking the time to create new demos and videos for customer prospects, you can both utilize that hard work and do your part in spreading the word by including video as a primary communication effort in email. It may seem like more work in theory, but once you get going you’ll realize that it’s an incredibly easy habit to get into the swing of and it personalizes your business relationships far beyond what bare-text email chains can even dream of.
