How to Measure the ROI of Videos in Your Email Campaigns

By Dawn Bowman

Share on: 

How to Measure the ROI of Videos in Your Email Campaigns

The digital marketing landscape is dominated by video content — and rightly so. Videos have evolved into a powerful tool, especially in the hands of seasoned marketers. 

According to a survey conducted by Wistia, a whopping 93% of businesses agree that video is a vital component of their marketing strategy. 

Where do they use video content? You would be surprised to know that apart from websites, emails are the most common place where videos are used. 

Image via Wistia 

When the power of videos backs the high performance of email marketing, marketers can achieve amazing results. Embedding QR codes in email videos can drive higher engagement by offering recipients quick access to landing pages or promotions.

Now, you may be wondering how to measure the ROI of videos in your email campaigns. That’s what I’m here for. In this post, I’ll walk you through how to measure the ROI of your video content in emails and discuss the metrics you should track to quantify success. 

Strategies to Measure the ROI of Videos in Your Email Campaigns

One of the most critical questions every marketer asks is “Is my video marketing strategy bringing me big bucks?” The answer to this is more complicated than a simple yes or no. 

Incorporating videos into different strategies is an effective digital marketing practice, so you must know how to measure the ROI of videos in your email campaigns. 

Let’s dig in and know how it’s done. 

Identify Goals for Including Videos in Email Campaigns 

When you choose to include videos in your email campaigns, what do you hope to achieve? Do you want to enhance engagement or boost click-through rates? 

As you can see in the image below, videos can be used to generate leads, drive sales, educate the target audience about your products, and enhance brand awareness. They can also be used to improve your social media strategy

Image via Wistia 

Setting clear campaign goals is critical for various reasons. Your goals will determine the kind of videos you must create and the stages at which these videos should be shared. 

Another reason why goal setting is a vital initial step is because it helps determine the KPIs you should track. For in-depth information on email marketing KPIs, as explained in Attrock guide discusses the major metrics every marketer should consider. 

Unless you have a good understanding of your goals, learning how to measure the ROI of videos in your email campaigns would be futile.

Choose the Right Metrics to Measure ROI

Key performance indicators help you quantify how effective your video content is in enhancing the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. 

However, to gain valuable insights, you must always choose metrics that are most relevant to your goals. Importantly, these metrics should be communicated properly if you’re outsourcing email marketing to a freelancer or an agency. 

Now, let's look at some of the important email marketing metrics and what they measure. 

Views: Also known as the play rate, views indicate the number of times a video was watched. If the video view rate is 80%, it means that 8 out of 10 recipients watched your video. 

This KPI measures how effective your video is in creating a good first impression and building brand or product awareness. To optimize your view rate, it can be helpful to check your competitors' email marketing campaigns to see how they’re using video to capture attention and engage their audience.

Average View Duration: Watch time directly correlates to your video’s performance. This signifies that your video is relevant to the audience because they stuck around until the end to get all the details. 

The average view duration is calculated by the total view time of a video with the total number of views multiplied by 100. 

Click-through Rate: CTR is a metric that measures a video’s success in its true sense. It shows the percentage of viewers who were convinced by the video to go on and take the desired action. 

Tracking this metric will help you fine-tune your content and offerings for improved conversion rates. 

Engagement Rate: When viewers connect well with your videos, they’re bound to engage with them by liking and commenting. This metric estimates the engagement level of your videos by comparing interactions to the number of impressions or views. A higher proportion of interactions relative to impressions indicates a better engagement rate.

Social Sharing: This metric measures how often viewers organically share your video across social media platforms. Unlike simple views, this metric reflects your video's ability to inspire action and resonate with audiences. 

Tracking shares helps gauge how compelling and influential your content is, as it indicates viewers found it valuable enough to spread within their networks.

Look Beyond the Stats

Now, let me discuss a few factors that may not be directly related to email marketing but indirectly influence the outcome of your campaign. 

Website visits: Track the website traffic during the period your email marketing campaigns run. If you notice that emails containing videos drive more visitors, it’s a clear sign that your strategy is working effectively.

Subscription rate: Compare subscription rates across different months or seasons. If email campaigns featuring videos lead to more subscriptions, it likely reflects increased audience engagement and potentially a higher ROI.

Cost of Video Marketing: Lastly, measuring the ROI of videos in your email campaigns entails calculating overall video production costs — from pre-production to distribution. This also includes visual content creation tools, equipment, platform hosting, and more. 

Final Thoughts 

I can’t fully emphasize the value of adding videos to your email strategy. The benefits can be manyfold. However, it requires learning how to measure the ROI of videos in your email campaigns. 

The steps and metrics listed above are a great way to get you started. Go ahead and use powerful tools to track and analyze these KPIs to ensure phenomenal success for your email campaigns. 

What does our team do?

The Social Hire team never just do social media marketing.

What the Social Hire gang loves is making a difference for our clients, and we don't want to waste your, or our resources on campaigns that aren't right for your organisation, if it doesn't get your organisation the difference you need - we take a different approach. When your business utilises social media management, Social Hire get your brand the exposure it needs and offer your business the lift it needs to improve.

Our team of managers are a team that assists our partners improve their presence online by producing online marketing services on a regular basis. Our service is transparent and economical, which ensures that you get a great service and results that make a difference when you utilise our services. We arrange many different marketing services for enterprises from small businesses to large corporations to help make the most of of your company's social media marketing.

You might like these blog posts How to Turn Leads on Social Media Into Customers, How Internships Make Great Sourcing Opportunities, Marketing Your Side Gig as a Digital Nomad, and 6 Mistakes Small Businesses Make with Social Media Ads (and How to Avoid Them).

  Back to Small Business blogs