Using video in e-mail to increase webinar registrations

I’d like to share some interesting results of a recent e-mail campaign we ran to promote an online video webinar with author David Meerman Scott and IBM’s Social Media and Video guru, Tim Washer.

Campaign:
Rather than simply send an e-mail invitation to the webinar, we decided to create a short video preview to promote the event and include options in the e-mail to watch a video preview prior to registering.  The HTML email invitation (see image below) contained options for the recipient to watch a video preview, register for the event, view the event location, or find out more information about the guest speakers. The “Watch Preview”, “Register” and “Location” links all went to the same landing page, which contained the video preview and lead capture form (see Webinar Invite Landing Page).

Results:
The results can be seen on the image below:

The “Watch Preview” image and link garnered the largest number of click-throughs (62%), more than 3 times the click-throughs from the “Register” button (20%). However, when looking at the lead conversions on the landing page, the number of leads resulting from “Register” clicks (45%) was roughly equal to that of the “Watch Preview” clicks (44%).

Conclusions:
So, what does this mean for video effectiveness?

• While we didn’t test the effectiveness of this e-mail campaign without a video preview option, the overall conversion rate on the landing page was roughly 30%, which was significantly higher than campaigns we have run in the past.
• Although the video preview resulted in a lower conversion rate than the Register button, the video option helped to expose many more people to the webinar offer and to the VisibleGains brand. Our belief is that more people are likely to invest some of their time watching a video preview of a webinar event to see if it interests them, prior to registering for it outright – much in the same way that people will watch more movie previews than they do full-length movies.
• This conclusion is further supported by looking at the behavior of the recipients in our opt-in house list (who know about VisibleGains) versus a purchased list (who most probably never heard of VisibleGains). The recipients in the VisibleGains house list selected the video option 58% of the time, whereas the purchased list recipients opted to watch the video 73% of the time.

How we did it (in 4 hours total)

• The video was shot on David’s Flip video camera and the raw file was sent to us via “YouSendit”. We then edited in some of Tim’s video clips using Apple Final Cut Pro.
• Using the VisibleGains VideoApp builder, we imported the video and created a VideoApp that included a lead capture form at the end integrated with Hubspot.
• We used Constant Contact to create, send and track the email campaigns to our house list and Pinpointe to do the same with a purchased list.
• We used Hubspot to create the landing page which contained the VisibleGains VideoApp and track the leads captured via the various channels.