The publisher of Email Marketing Reports, Mark has put out another brilliant email marketing video. This time he takes on B2B marketing emails. He pretends to be one, an email newsletter, as he talks “at” you, the viewer/reader. With humor that’s painfully on target, he talks through the major sins B2B email marketing commits on a daily, if not hourly, basis:

• The email arrives 8 months later than expected
• The email isn’t targeted to the recipient
• The email is self-serving
• The email lacks any real personalization
• The email content is irrelevant
• The email is one-sided
• The email offer is unrelated to the recipient

There’s more, and every second is worth your attention. You’ll definitely snicker if not guffaw, and might cringe a little too, if you are in B2B email marketing.

This also might serve as ammunition to get upper management to listen when you’re trying to convince them the email marketing ROI would be higher if the email newsletter were better! So maybe this bit of viral video can be put to good use.

Watch Mark act the part of a B2B email newsletter by clicking here.

Video email is one of those new technologies that might or might not make sense for your email marketing initiatives. Video has become easier to do and easier to disseminate. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

We turned to our own email design guru to ask what email marketers should consider when exploring video email. Cameron gave us the following points to consider:

Video email makes sense if you have a complicated product. It also makes sense if you can tailor your video to the person watching it, as opposed to doing batch and blast, which is sadly still a rampant email marketing practice. Yes, there are ways to segment even your video email content! When personalized, video email response rates increase.

Similar to including alt text to make up for blocked images, use text to describe your video, including a call to action to get people to click through and watch it. Write it as a mini sales pitch, not just a description. It doesn’t work to put any rich media inside the email, including video. Your recipients will have to open the email and click through to watch it. Encourage them to do so.

Video email might involve follow up to make it work. Cameron calls it high tech followed by high touch: You have a mechanism to alert you when someone has viewed the video, then that person gets a follow up email or phone call from your sales team.

Make sure it works seamlessly, because unless you’re offering “can’t miss” content, your customers won’t wait for a slow video to load, or sit through a clunky one that’s painful to watch.

As with all email marketing campaigns, make sure your video email is relevant to the target audience. And, as always, test, test, test to make sure it’s worth your effort and your customer’s time to include the video in the first place!

P.S. Email Marketing Reports just posted some new information about video email, and the pros and cons of different ways of putting video into email. It’s definitely worth a look.

If you need some help exploring video email, feel free to contact us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com.