Graduate to Multimedia

Increasingly email and conversion experts are advocating multimedia.  They point out how video is engaging and can quickly grab a visitor’s attention.  Metrics also support the claim.  Here’s what’s lost in translation.  Doing multimedia takes more time, money, and/or energy.  So while multimedia is advantageous, you need to decide if it’s worth investing in, or whether it’s something you want to graduate into.

For instance doing a video email campaign will likely show improved open and click through rates over a static one.  However if the email campaign is in its infancy and only has 100 subscribers, the extra cost of producing the videos probably isn’t worthwhile.  The key to making a decision on doing multimedia is factoring in the return on your investment.

For instance if the email campaign above has a 20% open rate and of those opens it has a 5% click through rate, then we know that 1 person takes action on every email (as an average).  Let’s pretend research showed that a video email campaign in the same industry and similar business size resulted in click-through rates tripling.  If the average action results in a $5.00 sale, then the subscriber list likely needs to grow significantly to justify the investment into multimedia campaigns.  However, if the average result is a $20,000 sale, then we’d be foolish not to begin a video campaign.

Multimedia has shown to increase conversions in email and on the web fairly consistently.  However, like most business decisions we need to weigh the pros and cons.  Spend some time with your web and email metrics to see if adding multimedia is a worthwhile endeavor.  It’s very possible that you’ll want to graduate into the technology, just make sure the numbers agree.