Video email: make your campaigns shine with Dartagnan

Video email—integrating a video directly into the message—means more impact, more reading time, and better engagement for your campaigns. Technically impossible? Not for the email musketeers! Thanks to its interface, Dartagnan makes using video in email simple and straightforward.

If you regularly visit this blog or are already a user of the Dartagnan email builder, you are probably aware of the power of email for:

• Acquiring new customers, where it is 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter
• Generating qualified traffic: along with Instagram, email is the source of traffic that results in the longest visits
• Ultimately driving conversions, as the ROI of email marketing is 3800%, making it the most effective channel for marketers

At the same time, you may have invested in creating video content. Rightly so, as this medium is highly favored by consumers.

• French internet users spend 20% of their online time watching videos (a third among 15-24 year-olds)
• With 1.5 billion visitors per day, YouTube became the top destination for internet users in 2016, ahead of Google
• On a site that offers video, users spend 88% more time and are 85% more likely to purchase

Email + Video = ROI

But here’s the challenge: until now, due to a lack of satisfactory technical solutions, these two powerful tools for digital marketers could not be combined. Or they were combined in unconvincing ways (a “fake” video player image linking to a landing page, most often).

However, studies show that video email is a real performance booster for your campaigns:

• Higher open rates with the word “video” in the subject line (13% on average versus 7% without)
• More reading time. A key metric considering that most emails are skimmed in just about ten seconds
• Higher engagement: emails with video generate 96% more clicks than those without
• And thus more ROI in the end (2 to 3 times more)

Dartagnan: your videos truly integrated into the email

What if we finally made them work together? What if your carefully scripted, filmed, edited, and promoted videos on your site and social accounts could also reach your customers directly in their inbox?

This is exactly what our solution, developed in partnership with another web expert—Novastream—allows. Novastream, specialists in online video management, helps numerous clients (Leroy-Merlin, Allianz, Norauto…) centralize, distribute across multiple platforms, and measure video engagement.

Backed by our responsive email editor compatible with over 90% of email clients, the solution we co-developed allows for video integration viewable directly in most existing configurations, including the most common ones (Orange and SFR Mail, Samsung Galaxy, iOS 10 and the upcoming iOS 11 according to our beta tests, etc.).

And for those that still do not support video integration in the email? Our email builder allows you to use an animated GIF instead, or if needed, a static image linking to the video.

Update: Novastream is no longer our partner.

What will video email bring to our clients and users?

• Direct video playback in most email clients, thanks to automatic video conversion within the tool
• Assured deliverability, with optimized weight/quality ratio
• Optimal visibility: videos are hosted on high-availability servers (CDN) to handle viewing spikes
• All done much faster and more efficiently than manual attempts

In the same spirit as our responsive email creation interface, this new feature is designed to be user-friendly and quick to learn. To allow you to focus on your added value: the offer and the message.

“Our clients pointed out that they needed a solution to fully leverage their videos, including for email campaigns. With Novastream, we found a reliable and easy-to-use solution to combine both and usher email marketing into a new era.”

— Christine Richard, Director and Founder of Dartagnan

Convinced or curious to learn more?