Video marketing is on the rise, and in the golden age of online content known as 2019, video isn’t going away anytime soon.

Since email marketing is such a strong driver of sales, and video can drive all sorts of outcomes depending on when you use it along your sales funnel and what goal you’re trying to achieve, combining your video and email marketing efforts is a no-brainer.

You see, video marketing isn’t just for raising brand awareness or funneling viewers to your website to get them to sign up for your email list. Video can actually be used to great effect over the entire course of your marketing funnel. As video can be used to attract new customers during the awareness stage, it can be used to engage web viewers on your homepage during the consideration stage, and then nurture prospects into becoming customers during the decision stage.

That last stage is where video can be the most effective in your email marketing efforts. In your funnel, while you’re trying to build a relationship with your subscribers to get them to convert into sales, what you’re doing is providing them value to attempt to win them over.

Sharing newsletters, tips, tricks, and discounts are all ways you can provide value to your subscribers, and video in your emails is a great way to combine all three while increasing click-through rates by 200-300 percent.

Also, video not only increases a viewer’s decision to buy by up to 85 percent but 90 percent of customers self-reported that watching a video helped sway their decision, which is why you not only want to use video in your marketing emails but in your sales prospecting emails, as well.

With that being said, here are a handful of video ideas you can add to your email marketing efforts in order to increase click-throughs, nurture more leads, and positively impact sales prospecting.

1. Share a customer spotlight video

One of the first things you’re going to try to do when nurturing your email subscribers is proving your worth. You’ve done the leg work of proving your subscribers know who you are and are interested in what you have to offer, but they gave you their email because they weren’t ready to buy. Now, you need to warm them up to the idea of buying, and one of the best ways to do that is through social proof.

By sharing someone else’s success with a customer spotlight video, which is a video that highlights one of your recent customers and a recent success story of theirs tied to your product or service, you’re providing credibility for yourself and awakening their imagination to the possibilities of what buying your product or service will look like. When viewers can visualize their future results, it becomes easier to accept the idea of buying.

2. Turn your frequently asked questions into an FAQ video

A good deal of time spent nurturing leads in the decision stage also helps relieve your prospect’s fears and anxieties. They’re afraid of buying your product or service and losing money on something they’re unsure about. Answering frequently asked questions helps save your sales and customer support teams’ time, while also easing some of these fears and anxieties.

To help the information land better, try turning those FAQs into an FAQ video, where you answer your prospective customers’ questions in a video format, either with a spokesperson talking directly to the camera or with voice-over or animated text. Because viewers retain up to 95 percent of a message after watching it, compared to only 10 percent retained after reading it, FAQ videos are not only more engaging to your subscribers but will help them hold on to the information you’re providing better.

3. Share third-party product review videos

Along with answering customer questions, showing third-party validation is another way to help put aside your subscribers’ fears and doubts about your product. Your subscribers are going to be looking for reviews for your product or service anyway, whether it’s on Amazon, Yelp, or other places, so why not put their doubts aside by sharing product reviews yourself?

You can find or commission a well-known reviewer to come to try your product himself or herself and film it as a product review video. You can even work with YouTube or Instagram influencers to create the video themselves and then share it in your email marketing once it’s complete. This will build more social proof, like a customer spotlight, while also answering viewer questions like an FAQ video. Call it a nurture two-for-one video!

4. Turn a recent event into an event video

One smart way to continue to nurture leads in a subtle way is to film a recent or upcoming event and turn it into an event video. Whether it’s an event you hosted or an event you participated in, bring a camera crew and record the experience to show your company out and about and participating with the rest of the world.

This creates outside validation that you’re a known brand offering a real product or service, and if you get positive reactions from the crowd at your event, what better way to use that than to share it with your subscribers who are on the fence? If others love it, by the law of attraction (or the unwritten laws of FOMO), your subscribers will start to lean toward jumping on the bandwagon, too.

5. Share popular social content videos in an end-of-the-week email

If you’re already engaging in video marketing efforts, the bulk of your videos are probably showing up on your company’s social media channels. Your social media team might even share videos from around the web to engage your followers. In either case, you should track the response each video gets from your followers. One way to use that data is to re-share your top liked, most viewed, or most commented-on videos in a social content video email recap.

By re-sharing social content, you get double the value from it, and you aren’t losing valuable videos with engaging content to the daily scroll. Since your social followers and email subscribers might make up different audiences, it’s good to have double the reach. Social content is so easy to miss – sharing a video both in social and in email means a higher chance that content is actually seen. This is especially true if you’re producing your own social content videos. Since corporate video production can be expensive, it’s better to recycle and reuse videos, especially if they perform well.

6. Try a before and after compilation video to show results

Another way to encourage those subscribers that are on the fence is to share the positive results of your product or service in action through a before and after the video. Like a customer spotlight or a product review video, this type of video helps your subscribers visualize their future after buying your product.

Plus, by showing the before, you can remind customers of where they are now to encourage how much they can use a change. In particular, by rounding up a bunch of before and after footage and creating a before and after compilation of multiple success stories, you can show social proof and prove your product works for many customers, not just a select few.

7. Send personalized welcome, thank you, or customer support videos

Personalized videos can be great for sales emails in particular. There are quite a few companies that offer these services, where you can customize the video to the name of the person reading the email, but even a personally recorded old-fashioned webcam or iPhone video from the individual sales rep can increase the positive results of your lead nurturing.

As far as welcome, thank you, and customer support videos are concerned, these types of videos are more for delighting customers after they’ve made a purchase than nurturing leads, but by using the same tactics as a sales rep nurturing a prospect with a personalized video response, you can increase customer satisfaction that leads to further sales or referrals later down the line.

8. Any video in your email

Videos in your email marketing increase positive results, whether it’s click-throughs, opens, or straight-up sales conversions. Even just including the word “video” in your email subject lines is guaranteed to increase open rates over those without it. If you aren’t currently producing your own marketing video content, find a video production partner to work with. If you’re leaving video content out of your email, you’re leaving more nurtured leads, more customers, and more money on the table.