Watch the video version of this newsletter

Hi friend,

At the beginning of July I wrote a newsletter about why you should include a video version of your newsletter in your newsletter.

Since then, we’ve been experimenting with video to understand how it impacts engagement and how to use it to get the most interaction possible.

Your mileage may vary with some of these recommendations and I encourage you to test for yourself (AWeber’s split testing tools were the real heroes here); but I think we’re learning some interesting things.

Let’s jump into the good stuff.

Does including a video version increase clicks?

This is a clear yes from my point of view.

We didn’t directly split test this, but we started including video versions in our July 6th newsletter version, didn’t make any other purposeful changes, and have seen elevated click rates in all of our newsletters with video compared to newsletters sent in June without video.

88% increase on average in the percentage of people who clicked a link in the emails that included a video version.

In addition to the increase in click rate, we’ve also been getting responses from our audience telling us that they like the format.

“Video is best for the key message and the rest for resources - difficult to catch in a video but sent me back to the email for detail and links."

“Very informative, much more personal than a print version.”

“Very clear and on point, and I love video content”

What do you do about it?

I think you should experiment with adding videos to your newsletter. Try it for a couple weeks and see if you see increased engagement. I’d love to hear about your experience, reply to this email and let me know if it works for you!

Don’t feel like this has to be a full studio production. This is the simple process I follow:

1. Get your camera set up. Just use a webcam or your phone to start.
2. Record yourself reading your newsletter. Don't focus on getting this perfect when you're just getting started. Focus on getting it done.
3. Upload your video to YouTube. Upload as a public video so it gets indexed by YouTube, the second most used search engine in the world.
4. You can paste a link to your video onto a blank line in your message and AWeber will automatically turn it into a stylized link preview block.

How can you get more clicks on the videos in your email?

I was pretty confident a video version was working, so I wanted to know how to get even more people to click on the video.

I had a hypothesis that if we could showcase the dynamism and movement of a video using an animated thumbnail, we’d see more clicks than if we used a static thumbnail.

To test the idea, I ran 3 split tests over the past 3 weeks where the only difference was the video thumbnail:

Control: Static Image

Variation: Animated Gif

Test 1: Is Threads for You?

Test 2: How you can leverage influencer marketing (starting from zero)

Test 3: Running out of ideas?

As you can see, the animated thumbnail got a higher click rate in every test.

How can you make an animated version of your video?

Giphy has a great, simple tool for creating an animated gif from a YouTube video.

1. Go to Giphy uploader (you’ll need to sign in to a free Giphy account to use this tool).
2. Paste a link to your YouTube video into the “Any URL” field.
3. Trim your animation to no longer than 6 seconds and go to the next step.
4. Create your gif.
5. Download your gif and add it to your newsletter. You’re now a gif-ted emailer!

We’ve got more tests up our sleeves…

All of this testing has made us even MORE curious. So stay tuned to see the results of future tests we run to answer the questions:

• Does a gif generated from the actual video content, or one designed specifically to get attention lead to more clicks?
• Do clicks on videos distract readers from the other links in an email? I have some evidence this is not the case, but I want to run some targeted tests here.
• Completely validate that video increases total clicks by testing an email with a video version directly against one without one.

If you enjoy reading about these tests, let me know. 

What did you think of this email?

❤️❤️❤️ Loved it. Can't wait to get the next one.

💔 I didn't like it.

Quickly add video links to your email

I know that email is probably only a piece of your business. So we’ve made it easy to include beautiful, interesting links to websites, posts and, you got it, video right in your message.

All you have to do is paste a link to a YouTube video onto a blank line in your message, hit enter, select “turn into a link preview”:
 

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As always, thanks for reading!

- Chris V. and the rest of the AWeber team
 

P.S. It's time to unlock the power of AWeber Plus. Get all the email and automation solutions to help you quickly and easily grow your audience, build connections, and make sales. 

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