In Vegas a few weeks ago at the Sherpa Email Summit, we heard about relevancy, deliverability, campaign optimization, mobile and even real-time marketing.  But where was video?   I got the impression that there was still a lot of blocking and tackling to focus on – the fundamentals – to execute well run campaigns and that video was an extra.  Why not make video central to how you think about your marketing campaigns?

Here are some ways that video email addresses key points raised by conference speakers and panel members:

Real-time David Meerman Scott’s keynote on real-time marketing was one of the highlights of the show.  He made the point that real-time adoption requires a change of mindset, new tools, even the creation of a Chief Real-time Officer.  How cool is that title? I think the same mindset change is needed to adopt video within an organization.   Better yet, why not incorporate video into your real-time initiatives?  David advocates “brand journalism” including add journalists to your marketing team to cover your industry.  Why not take it a step further and add a videographer?  No medium is better suited to communicate what’s hot and what’s new than video

Good Tools Creating and editing video has never been easier and cheaper.  Your smart phone works just fine (the iphone’s 640×480 and 30p frame rate works just fine for most cases) as do flip cams and most digital cameras.  Video editing tools are now cheap and powerful.  We like   Pinnacle from the pros at Avid.  We all have stories to tell and experiences to share.  Let’s start capturing the moment in video.

Mobile It’s no secret that mobile email use is going up.  BombBomb supports the new HTML5 standard which allows the delivery of video email to iDevices where the video plays within the email.  Other devices that support flash (Android) open the video within a landing page.

Testing Video email companies have made some lofty claims in the past about video email campaign performance.  The proof is always found in the testing.  We have clients split test video email against non-video email every week.  Truthfully you won’t know how it will perform for your audience until you test it.

Tags: Marketing Sherpa 2011, Real-Time Email Marketing, video email