The Challenges of bringing Video to Email Marketing.

Online video is a fast-growing channel in digital marketing, and North American marketers are confident that video will prove beneficial to their email efforts, according to “The 2010 Video Email Marketing Survey and Industry Trends Report” from the Web Video Marketing Council.

Seven in 10 marketers said they were using some type of online video in their digital marketing campaigns already, and half were using video in conjunction with email. Nearly a quarter more were considering doing so.

Marketers are eager to join video with email because they believe it will increase effectiveness: 73% of respondents thought video would raise clickthrough rates for their email programs, and the same number believed video made email recipients more likely to convert.

Barriers remain, however, and marketers are not yet ready to include sound and motion in all their messages. Ease of implementation was most commonly cited as the main difficulty in using video in email marketing, followed by cost and the availability of video assets.

“Marketers realize that video drives much higher email engagement and response rates and that it is getting harder to differentiate email marketing with static content,” said Wayne Wall, CEO of video marketing and analytics technology developer Flimp Media, which conducted the survey along with the Web Video Marketing Council and ExactTarget. “In contrast, 79 percent of marketers surveyed said their email service provider does not offer a video marketing solution or they weren’t aware if they did.”

Marketers believed the most effective way to integrate video with their email campaigns was to link recipients to a video landing page, closely followed by embedding video players directly in email messages.

Embedded videos pose even more of an implementation challenge, however; the report says there are “no viable solutions” for doing so except for one beta product that works only with AOL.

For more information at http://www.emarketer.com