In an earlier article, I talked about using email and video together as part of an inbound marketing strategy. I am going to walk you through a recent example to show you how I integrate video with email marketing.

I just finished a trailer for my documentary film - Marine on St. Croix. I thought it would be a good time to spread the word and start developing a list of people who might be interested in the project. So I put together a quick inbound marketing plan that looked like this...

1. Send a video email to my contact list

2. Link the video email to my website page/blog

3. Use a call to action to encourage viewers to share the video.

4. Create a form to let viewers sign up for additional information

5. Track the results

6. Let’s look at each one individually.

1. Send a video email to my contact list.

Whether they’re friends, colleagues, clients, supporters, etc. it’s important that the people on your list are willing to receive your emails. The amount of email spam is astounding so getting any email open is no small task. When you send an email with a video thumbnail, you have a distinct advantage because people find video more interesting than pictures or words. As you can see below, I try and keep my email as simple and clean as possible - logo, descriptive sentence and video thumbnail. That’s it.

2. Link email to website page/blog.

The point of any email is to drive traffic directly to your website. Your video should live on a specific page where you can include additional information and specific calls to action. If you anticipate viewers coming to your site via a link (like email) it’s a good idea to set your video player to autoplay. It creates a very seamless experience for the user. They click on the thumbnail, it launches a web page and the video starts playing automatically.

3. Encourage viewers to share the video.

Make sure that your video embed provides ample opportunity for sharing. You can see below that my video can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Viewers can also email it directly. The other thing I did was put a very specific call to action at the end that said, “Please help spread the word by sharing this video.”

4. Create a form to let viewers sign up for additional information.

I’m a long way from finishing this documentary but it seemed like a good time to start marketing the film. A critical piece of any inbound marketing plan is building a list that you can market to. After driving traffic to my website, I wanted to make sure I gave people a way to get information and updates on the film so I put a signup sheet right underneath the video.

5. Track the results.

There are a tremendous number of tools that you can use to monitor your internet marketing efforts. I use Hubspot for email marketing, list building, keyword research, website hosting/management, blogging and social media. I use Wistia to host video and maximize its performance. Between these two, I get incredible visibility on how people are responding to my inbound marketing efforts.

I’m going to walk you through my results. Let’s look at the email first. You can see below that it was sent to 801 people. 168 people clicked on the video. The email addresses have been blurred out to protect people’s privacy but I can see specifically who opened the email and watched the trailer.

So what happened when people got to the video on my web page? Wistia has a great summary below that highlights the video’s performance. Again, not only do I get consolidated stats, I’m also able to see how individuals watched the video as well. A number that I’m excited about is the fact that people on average are watching 80% of the video. This is a relatively strong number.

Now let’s look at how I’m doing in regards to building a marketing list. From 679 views, I have a conversion rate of 7.7% resulting in 45 contacts. From my Wistia stats, I know that that conversion number is actually a lot better because I can see that many people watched the video multiple times. Given the fact that the sign-up sheet was just a request for additional info, I’m psyched with these results. Normally you need to attract people with a specific offer.