Guest post by Selena Narayanasamy

The hybrid of watching videos and reading emails, arguably the two biggest ways to spend time on the Internet, seems like a match made in heaven. After all, what’s not to love about combining these two powerful means of communication? And video email is on the rise. What was once a tech-lover fantasy may now be a blossoming reality for the masses. This is thanks to both creative applications of old technologies and some emerging technologies.

Click-on-This: The Classic Approach

YouTube became popular because countless people sent emails to all their friends with links to funny videos. These simple links take people to a video site where the content is played. Revolutionary, right?

How to Use Video Links

There are several great tips you can use when following the traditional method of sharing videos.

1) Link using a picture. Instead of linking text, link an image that’s relevant to the video in question. This is shown to significantly improve click-through.

2) Use a call to action. Rather than simply providing a link, use phrasing such as “click here to see our product in action.” Do this even if you’re linking with an image.

3) Explain the relevance and value. Prior to dropping the link, let people know why it’s worthwhile to watch.

Animated Gifs: They’re Not Just for Forum Signatures Anymore

It’s nearly impossible to imagine that these disreputable animations would have anything to offer a new web trend–proof that reality sometimes exceeds our imagination. Big names in marketing like Chad White, Anna Yeaman, and Justin Foster all contributed to the recognition of what has been named “animated image video.”

While these moving images are lacking in sound, animated gifs, nonetheless, make for an excellent presentation. The technology for making high quality images with this medium has progressed with time, and the end result is a great marketing tool.

How to Use Animated Image Videos

There are many types of software that can allow you to create animated gifs, and some of them are even free to use. The more professional software types (such as the Adobe Creative Suite) are also pricey, but do come with a free trial. Once created, these images can be embedded into emails and sent out. The only real downfall is that some email hosting groups block images, which includes your mini-video.

Embedding: Why Videos Will Take Over Emailing

The new horizon of video emailing is embedding videos directly into the message itself. Big breakthroughs from third-party companies, who are now pitching their video mail products to the email hosting industry leaders, seem imminent. In the meantime, Google has released a quick solution for watching videos directly from your inbox.

How to Use Video Embedding

To use Gmail’s option, simply sending a linked video based in YouTube is sufficient. Once available as a labs feature, Gmail now allows all users to play videos while reading the message itself.

Video emailing has seemed inevitable for a long time. While there are certainly still kinks to work out in current video mail systems, solutions and new functionality are just around the bend.

About the author

Selena Narayanasamy loves everything having to do with technology, social media, internet marketing and blogging. You can find her quirky ramblings on Twitter, or her personal site Esvienne.

Those two concepts put together, not likely to win the “couple of the year” award, are they? And they shouldn’t, simply because guilt trips should never be part of business emails, especially when it’s the first email you send out!

Imagine this! You want to introduce your recently launched business. You mention your website, then jump to saying you have a kid who’s just turned two and add a link to cute photos of that kid. Then mention an obscure site you used to have but no longer exist. And finally, in paragraph 4 actually mention one of the services you provide. Nothing on your expertise, no reference to satisfied customers, no detailed skill set of your team. Just throw the baby in, that’s bound to work!

No matter how I twist and turn it, other than guilt trip, no other reason comes to mind for mentioning offsprings and showing photos to potential customers. Maybe, just maybe, if you were a photographer specializing in newborns and toddlers, there might be a reason for the photos. But saying your main quality as a business professional is having a child? It’s crazy! And the image of yourself you put out there has little to no chance to generating leads or sealing the deal.

Remember, you’re trying to build a business relationship! Yes, if you’ve had a client for years, a personal bond develops, you might even become friends and show eachother family photos. But if it’s a new client you’re targeting, keep it professional and tell them how you can help them grow their business. Honestly, they couldn’t care less about you as a dad!

…be smart about how you try again!

I don’t really understand why some PR and marketing professionals are off to a good start and then mess it all up in the end! Let’s say you have a cool security product to promote. You wander around the blogosphere, looking for relevant blogs. You find them, you make sure they have covered a certain story, one presenting a problem your product can easily solve. You send a nice email to the author of the blog, showing that you’ve read it, understood who they target and only then contacted them.

All great! You get no reply for a couple of days. And you ask yourself: “Shouldn’t I remind them of my initial email?” And then you blow it! Instead of writing a short follow up email, you resend the same email, completely disregarding the fact you’ve already sent it again. If you take the time to try again, why not do it right?

I’ve recently received an email looking like an attempt at email marketing, promising me some world renowned book for free. I was intrigued by a) the fact that the spam filter didn’t catch it and b) my not knowing anything about the book. So I took a second look at the content, thinking it might be some promotional ebook version sent out to bloggers by someone with way too little experience.

I saw the price for the book, big and shinny, along with a promotional discount image. I deleted it and moved on. But it got me thinking about all the promises marketers and PR people make in their emails and how not keeping them makes them lose potential customers, potential exposure on different channels, their reputation and more.

Why do people make promises they don’t keep in the email body? Simply because they’ve read somewhere that the subject line needs to be informative, but catchy. It needs to make the person seeing it want to read your email. And yes, you need to give it your best shot, but making up a big fat lie won’t help you! So if it’s a big fat discount, say so, if it’s a newsletter, make sure it’s not pure sales copy (see news in the name), if you’re offering something free, ok, you can say it with a clever phrase (not the capitalized FREE that triggers spam filters). But say what you mean, don’t hide behind false pretenses!

It’s like those articles who’s headline says one thing and they’re actually about something else. They disappoint you, get you a bit angry and no matter what, you won’t really give in to a second try. Once you’ve disappointed a potential customer, they won’t buy from you, unless they are forced to (company policies, an explicit request from someone). But they will do so only if their attempt at convincing the others to switch to a different product or service fails.

So why lose customers, get some bad reviews and damage your reputation just to increase the number of “read” emails. While we all want to know how many people have read our emails and how many of them clicked on the buy/more/visit us links and thoroughly keep an eye on these metrics, they are not really relevant. Clicks are a bit more relevant. But opening an email does not mean the user has read the copy, understood what you are saying and is just about to come buy what you’re selling. That you’ll get to measure by paying attention to who actually bought, the number of replies saying they’ve actually tried and loved your product or service, etc.

When it comes to blogging, email marketing and a bunch of other PR and Marketing tools, taking the metrics out of context and relying on them alone happens all too often. We lose sight of what’s really important and that is getting more people to buy by helping them solve a problem, increase productivity, making them happy or whatever it is that you do for your customers.

Photo credit: unknown apparently, I found it here.

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Welcome to a new edition of our almost-weekly reading roundup. First of all, I’d like to wish you Happy Monday! Hope your week is as bright as today’s sun, keep busy but don’t stress out, but before anything else, try reading the posts I’ve run across!

Tanya Maslach, guest writer on Women on Business gives businesses a new perspective: a few great lessons they could learn from Hollywood.

Liz Strauss, in her “Visible Authenticity” series, identifies 10 blogger best practices we should use when extending our reach.

We’ve all heard of sucessful blogger pitches, of results and of how we should adapt our message to each of the persons we contact. If you really want to see how it’s done, Tod Defren of PR Squared has published a great case study showing how exactly one should write to fit the profile and background of each blogger they contact.

Regardless of their field, ailing businesses have some common issues. Karen Swim of Words for Hire has identified 5 of the common problems businesses on a falling trend seem to be caught up in.

Mary Schmidt, a guest author on Lip-Sticking, has come up with a funny list of things to do when you want your emailes automatically ignored.

And to finish this week’s roundup on a funny note, I recommend Ian Lurie’s Geek Guide to Problem Solving, or otherwise put, 10 ways to think for yourself.

What did I miss? No matter how hard I try, I definitely can’t read all the great posts published in a week. So please tell me what you’ve come across and let’s all share our findings!

Have a lovely week!