As a business owner, your email list is of critical importance because it’s one of the best ways you have to take your core message directly to your target audience. While social media lets you cast a wide net, your email list lets you cast a precise one. It gives you a chance to speak directly to people who have already shown interest in what you have to offer, thus helping to seal the deal and move them further down the line towards an eventual purchase.
With that in mind, there are six core ways that you can leverage video marketing to help grow your email list beyond your wildest dreams.
1. Collect emails directly from the video
Obviously, this particular method is ideal because it puts as few steps in between “engage with a lead” and “collect their contact information” as possible. It’s not available with all distribution channels, but those that do offer it are absolutely worth taking advantage of.
Wistia, for example, has a feature called “Turnstile” that allows you to ask for emails before the viewer can watch your video. A great way to utilize this tactic is by using in-depth tutorials, webinars, interviews and even on-demand demo videos for your products and services.
The best part of all is that you can then connect Wistia to a platform like MailChimp and start growing your email list automatically.
2. The lead magnet approach
Another great way to use video content marketing to build your email list involves offering video content as a lead magnet. Let’s say you’ve created a series of video tutorials, for example, that will eventually be housed on your own OTT service. You could take the first video in the series, create a landing page for it and put it behind a lead generation form. People only get to see the content after they’ve given you their email address and other relevant contact information.
Depending on what your long-term goals are, you could even collect emails in exchange for access to the entire series. Just make sure that your content is laser-focused on the type of people that you’re trying to attract in the first place. If you were targeting people in the fitness industry who also own their own business, for example, you might make a series of videos on “How to Make More Money in Fitness.“
Your value proposition is already high – who wouldn’t want to make more money doing something they love? – so people will be more than willing to give you their contact information in exchange for the value they’ll get in return once they watch the videos.
3. Optimizing your YouTube Channel
When it comes to using video marketing to grow your email list, obviously the quality of that content is the most important factor. If you don’t know how to make a killer YouTube video in the first place, all the channel optimization techniques in the world won’t be able to help you.
Having said that, once you DO have that high-quality piece of collateral, there are a number of steps you can take to start collecting more email addresses than you know what to do with.
Be sure to take advantage of every opportunity to link to your lead magnet as possible – and there are more of them than you think. You could include links in your video description, in the “about” tab, in the channel header and elsewhere – all of which can point someone to a lead generation form that you can use to collect their email address. You can even use YouTube cards, which themselves can appear during any point in your video, to do essentially the same thing.
4. The art of the pitch
There’s also something to be said about growing your email list with video marketing “the old-fashioned way” – meaning that you come right out and ask people to join at the end of your video.
Think about it like this: if you’ve followed all the best practices of video content creation, you ARE providing something inherently valuable to your target audience. Not only that, but they’ve already enjoyed the content and they had the pleasure of doing so totally free of charge.
At that point, why not just add a short “join my list” call to action at the end of your content? It absolutely won’t hurt your completion rates because it will be coming at the end. Likewise, people will be more likely to take this step because, by that point, they know that you’re capable of doing exactly what you said you could.
5. Embracing video landing pages
It’s long been said that videos can increase the conversion rates of your landing pages by as much as 80% in a lot of cases. What you might not realize is that they’re great for more than just selling your primary offer. When leveraged properly, video landing pages can also be a perfect way to grow your email list, too.
You could go about this in a few different ways. As stated above, you could ask for someone’s email address before the video starts to play. Because they’re already on your landing page (meaning they’re already at least somewhat interested in your offer), there’s a good chance they’ll take you up on this.
But as your video starts to play, you could also have a window pop up giving access to even more helpful, relevant content in exchange for someone’s email address. Videos already increase the amount of time someone spends on a page, meaning that they have longer to be exposed to your message. All of this can make a very, very compelling argument that they should (and likely will) give you their email address in exchange for more of the same.
6. Utilising feature boxes
Last but not least we have feature boxes – something that has been a staple of the Internet for roughly as long as the Internet has been around.
For those unfamiliar, a feature box is an email opt-in box pop up. Think about it like a landing page that is specifically designed for building your email list. Like a landing page, it usually offers some type of lead magnet to convince people to give up their email address in the first place. They’re already undeniably effective, and adding a video to your feature box can help take that impact to the next level.
Image: OptinMonster
In truth, you’ll likely want to use a combination of all of these methods to use video marketing to grow your email list. Any one of them would be good on their own… but taken together, you’ve got a sure-fire strategy that will have an endless stream of email addresses that will keep your list growing for the foreseeable future.