This has got more potential than anything I’ve seen in a while.
If you do any form of email marketing, this is something you’ll want to test asap because now you can embed YouTube videos that play directly in your customers’ Gmail Inboxes.
No need for your customers to click on an outbound link or take an intermediate step, they just click on the play button and your video plays immediately.
So, lets say you intend to send your customers to a long scroller of a sales letter. You can now record a two-minute video with your webcam, upload the video to YouTube, then include the Youtube URL in your email broadcast.
The upshot is, you can give your customers a quick overview with a call to action at the end of the video before they click on the target link in your email message. This can make a world of difference when your customers arrive on your sales page.
And with Gmail possessing over 100 million users, plus being the fastest growing email service, this isn’t something to ignore.
You don’t need fancy production values or be a polished speaker to do this. If you screw up, as I did several times before recording this, you just do it over. Another benefit of embedding videos that play in your customers’ Inboxes is you establish you’re a real person. It’s hard to do enough of that.
No doubt, we’ll be seeing a lot of YouTube content sent directly into our email Inboxes in the near future. God help us when the spammers catch on!
Hi Lawrence,
Being a direct response marketer, I see the potential.
However, given the fact I absolutey hate video, AND being a Gmail user myself, I sincery hope the ‘usual suspects’ will never find out.
Sincerly,
Stephan
Hi Lawrence, definitely video will continue to be the fastest and biggest medium in all areas of media. Now, you have mobile plus the accuracy of measuring conversion rates, its well worth the effort to keep up to speed.
Lawrence,
My sincere apologies for the typos. Just wanted to submit a quick comment.
And if you are wondering: 46.3 % of my target market wants the printed stuff.
Sincerely,
Stephan
Hey Lawrence, extremely interesting. Do you have a link you can share so we can find how to do this? I’ve searched google and can’t find any info. Thanks for the great info.
Hi Paul,
No magic here.
You just cut-and-paste the YouTube link right into your email message.
Regs,
Lawrence
Brilliant Lawrence! Just brilliant…
Thanks for sharing this tidbit of knowledge. I cannot wait
to do some testing of this with my clients.
Hrm… now, I wonder is it possible to isolate out just
Gmail customers to send these emails to? Perhaps that will depend
on the auto-responder service one uses?
Anyhow, thanks again for sharing 😉
JC
Lawrence,
Great tip! If it is as simple as putting the YouTube link in the email, then there would probably be no need to segregate Gmail subscribers out of your list. You could send the same email to all and let Gmail do its thing.
But I’m guessing you actually have to send an HTML email and insert the YouTube embed code into that email. Is that correct?
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
There’s no need for anything fancy, just cut-and-paste the YT URL and you’re right, it’s not strictly necesary to segment the Gmail addresses.
The only reason we did it was to test “Scroll down to play Video” and then tell them in the video to “Click on the link above video.” I get a lot of “needlesly fancy” ideas like this but this one is bearing fruit wth the tests so far.
We did see a bump in sales (too few outings to make a conclusion yet) but more important, we noticed the TOPs (Time spent on page) was much higher after the call to action to watch the video in Gmail first.
Regs,
Lawrence
I can see the potential in this too. However, What happens when a non-gmail account receives the email?
I have tested using an image of a video within the email and this works very well.
I would also recommend testing a screenshot of the youtube page linking directly to the youtube video. Just an idea.
Great tip, however…
If I just copy/paste the video URL it does not show the video, only the link?
I would like the recipient of the email to be able to open and the video is there.
Is there a way to do this?
Maxi, what kind of browser are you using?
If the recipient of the message is using Gmail, as well as you, then it plays right in the Gmail window.