I have recently received two emails which have stood out from the rest because of their use of video. If  a picture paints a thousand words a video paints a few more than that.

Retail brands can spend millions on the creation of their TV adverts, not to mention the thousands spent on advertising slots between prime time TV programmes.  It therefore surprises me that more brands don’t make the most of these ads by sharing them with their email subscribers.

Below are the two emails that have used video to good effect:

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Over the past few weeks retailers have starting to send out the first of their Christmas related marketing emails. Although I am sure to have a new favourite by the time I am stuffed full on mince pies and watching the “Vicar of Dibley” on Christmas day, I have decided to share a couple that have already caught my eye.

One good

I doubt this email is personalised, unless the baubles change depending on the films you have recently rented! The fact that LOVEFILM have put the effort into customising the decorations makes me feel it is worth paying attention to this email.

The message is clear and to the point. The “Visit Shop” call to action and the time limit tells the customer what they need to do and when to do it.

It could be better though. The entire email is made up of images, when it would have been easy to turn the wording into real text, making the message clear even if images were disabled.

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The traditional email a friend has a few flaws, namely that it is always easier to hit forward in your email client than actually finding your friends addresses and copying and pasting them into the form you have provided. Secondly many people don’t have their friend’s addresses anymore and prefer to communicate via the likes of Facebook.

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At a recent event the question was raised how does social networking fit in with your email marketing strategy?
There were some obvious things – many pointed to putting links to their Facebook or Twitter page in their email newsletters. On the whole most people still don’t understand how to use the social networks and are finding their way. Indeed it reminds me of 6 years ago when everyone knew they “should be doing email marketing” but had no idea why, they just heard it was the thing to do and there was lots of money in it!

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Have you ever looked into how many of your email list ‘never’ open your emails? From our experience it can be anything from 40% to 70% of your list that do not open any of your emails, in many cases for 6 months.
So what can you do with this massive potential goldmine? Here are the options:

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