Recently there’s been a lot of talk online about how video can help e-commerce and adding interactivity to video is a natural progression to keep the viewer engaged. There was a great blog post written on effective trigger design for interactive video commerce which answers the question – how should video interactivity be applied to e-commerce video? It’s always been part of my approach on each project, what is the end goal? Are you a non-profit looking for donations, a company selling products looking for a purchase or maybe you are looking for viewers to contact you for more information and become more engaged with your brand? There are three steps (according to the Video Commerce Consortium blog post) to creating an effective trigger or call-to-action, I’m going to elaborate on each:

1.  The trigger must be noticeable. This sounds self explanatory, but you’d be surprised to realize that most consumers are passive viewers of online video content, they aren’t used to interacting with it. It also needs to be blatantly obvious to the viewer that interaction is possible.

2.  The trigger must be associated with the targeted behavior. When you are creating a call-to-action, think carefully about the wording and design because they can have a huge impact on the viewers expectations.  Don’t have a button that says “Product information” really be a link directly to add an item to a shopping cart. As an example, we have a customer who sells generally to engineers who will want to see product specifications before they consider purchasing so we incorporated a “Download Specifications PDF” right into the video. Carefully design the call-to-actions within your video experience to meet your viewers expectations.

3.  The trigger must occur when the user is both motivated and able to perform the target behavior. The great thing about online video is we can be more subtle with a call-to-action. As the Video Commerce Consortium blog post points out “clicking a mouse is still easier than picking up the phone”.  But scripting the video so the ask is part of the story is key, when are your customers most motivated to buy? Is it after a particular product or feature where a button can pop up so they can click that for more information about that feature?

Not sure where your video is peaking curiousity or if there is a falloff in viewership before they get to your call-to-action? Using a video measurement service like Visible Measures can precisely calculate video engagement by capturing every event that occurs within an Internet video player – each play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, share, embed, and more.

Not sure how to build those call-to-actions within your video? I recommend Flimp which has a great WYSIWYG interface to create landing pages and e-mail integration with Constant Contact as well as a few other major email service providers. I also suggest Permission TV which offers an outstanding video platform allowing you to build those call-to-action links right into the video player creating more interactive experiences to everyone who visits your site. Both offer outstanding analytics so you can track and analyze your video’s performance.

Ultimately a call-to-action is useless unless the video itself is engaging and can easily be found. If your video is buried on your website, who’s going to see it? What if the content is so boring no one ever gets to the call-to-action?

What you need to do is to think of the call-to-action within your video and the trigger button or action as one seamless process, not separate parts. That is the future of online video, it’s all part of the viewer experience.

That’s what I think anyway, what about you?

Recent Blog Posts:

Increasing Donations Using Video & E-Mail Marketing

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?

How Stanford University increased alumni donations.

Seeing how I’ve already talked about how integrating video in your email marketing can increase your click throughs by 175% I thought I’d profile another success story I read about online. Much of the information on this is exerpted from a great blog post by Tyler Willis for MediaPost called “When Juggernauts Collide: Email Marketing Meets Video Marketing” Here are the highlights of what I found most interesting from his post.

“Recent grads are far more likely to give a valid email address than a number (93% of the captive population vs. 38%), meaning that email marketing gives Stanford a better and more widespread ability to connect.”

Snail mail and “dialing-for-dollars” are incredibly inefficient ways to connect with new grads. Namely because direct mail is assumed to be junk mail by most recipients and you only get a response of about 2% (if you are lucky). Phone calling on the other hand is incredibly interruptive, who knows what the end user was doing or what you interrupted them from doing. Email is passive and can be opened or read when the end user is ready to read or respond to it.

Scott Jahnke, the Director of Student and Young Alumni Development, explains why he chose to combine email AND video as part of Stanford’s new alumni drive “Technology gives us the ability to do so much more than just text. How then, can we most effectively tell our story to thousands of people and inspire them to give? I believe that a combination of using email AND video to answer our three questions (why are we asking you for a gift, what is going to change if you give, and how will our organization make that change happen) is the so-called ’secret sauce.”

“At Stanford, the Young Alumni office produced several inspiring videos of students who had directly benefited from alumni contributions and attached a clear call-to-action to the end of each video, delivered via a Flash overlay that asked viewers to donate.”

This was key, by providing this call to action they were able to easily and effectively drive their alumni to take the steps they wanted them to take. Without a call-to-action, online video doesn’t effectively do it’s job.

“Calling out these videos, and providing a direct link to them in four out of five emails sent during Stanford’s fall campaign, helped increase gifts by 23% over the previous year’s fall campaign.”

This is a great first result and if they continue to refine their approach will probably become even more efficient. Couple this with the fact that they probably dramatically reduced their printing and postage costs from their direct mail campaign and/or their costs if they hired current students to do the telemarketing as part of a work study program. How does that affect their operational costs? Does it make their alumni gifts go longer.

If one of the most respected universities in the United States was able to buck the old trend of typical alumni gift campaigns and get these kind of outstanding results, what could combining the online marketing super powers of email marketing and online video do for your business or non-profit?

This past Thursday I got the opportunity to guest host a video podcast with Matthew Mamet of PermissionTV. Every Thursday they run a live show called PTVLIVE focusing on news, product releases and events with online video.

This was all new to me. I’m usually behind the camera or if in front of it, have a few takes to get the content right. Going live was definitely a little more stressful as evidenced by my “ums” and “errs” at the beginning of the show. But after a while I fell into a groove and was able to relax and enjoy the experience.

We covered some pretty interesting topics including integrating videos in your email marketing campaign, test driving the GoodMail Email Marketing Platform’s integrated video feature, discussing how much of a typical online video is actually watched and some big news for Visible Measures which now tracks videos at MySpace.

All in all this was a really great experience for me and the folks over at PermissionTV were fantastic. You can subscribe to their podcast through iTunes or watch weekly live at PTVLIVE. As promised I have given my 5 star rating on iTunes for this great podcast. Check out the full podcast below:

Zak Barron knows EVERYTHING about email marketing. Alright I could be exaggerating a tiny bit but he is the local email marketing expert for Constant Contact in the New England area and he definitely knows his stuff. He runs frequent seminars on email marketing, interactive training workshops, and industry specific programs. I have had the pleasure of doing a few combined seminars with Zak talking about combining online video and email marketing. I asked Zak if he would be interested in taking the hot seat for one of my 5 Question Interviews and without further ado, here are his answers:

Eric Guerin: I’ve heard Constant Contact’s deliverability to ISP’s (Internet Service Providers – i.e. Comcast, AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) is one of the highest among ESP’s (Email Service Providers like Constant Contact)…how are you able to maintain such a high level of deliverability?

Zak Barron: Good question Eric. Constant Contact currently has a deliverability rate above 97%. This is a key metric for ESP’s that anyone looking for an email marketing service should look at when making their decision. It’s very easy for a company to say, “We have 97% deliverability” so make sure you ask if that is the ESP’s number or a 3rd party number. Constant Contact uses an outside unbiased 3rd party called Return Path to evaluate our delivery rate. The reason that we are able to maintain this high deliverability rate is because we require all of our customers to use permission based email lists. We have built personal relationships with postmasters at many ISP’s, and they know that we share the same contempt for SPAM email, this also greatly impacts how the ISP’s view Constant Contact as a large sender of email messages.

EG: You mentioned permission based email lists, can you briefly explain what the importance of an “opt-in email list” is and why you would NEVER want to buy an email address list from another company?

ZB: It is critical to a business that it only use email to communicate with those whom have given their permission to receive emails from that business. Given that statement there are 2 levels of permission; implicit, and explicit. Implicit covers anyone that you have a prior business relationship with, but you might not have told them that you are going to begin sending them email campaigns. Explicit permission means that you are actually setting the expectation when you collect the contact information of a customer, or prospect, that they will be getting email campaigns. The main reason that a business needs to build it’s list in this manner is the issue of SPAM. Over the years consumers have become very weary of who they provide their contact information to, and how they react to messages that they have not asked for in their inboxes. With many email clients allowing their users to report unwanted email as SPAM, the ISP’s are able to track the reputation of senders and penalize them if they get to many SPAM reports/complaints by not allowing them access to their(ISP’s) customers inbox. The point is that a purchased or rented list will get tons of SPAM complaints, certainly enough to be noticed by the ISP’s. A business that insists on this practice will find themselves on industry wide “blocklists, or blacklists” which will directly affect the businesses ability to get email marketing campaigns out the door.

EG: That relationship with your contacts is really the key to a successful email marketing plan. Speaking of relationships, how does Constant Contact engage online and build community for their users?

ZB: At Constant Contact we are all about community, and to that end there are 2 ways that we do that, one is with the Constant Contact Connect Up! user community, and the 2nd is the Constant Contact Cares4Kids program.

Constant Contact’s ConnectUp! user community was designed as a forum to share the entrepreneurial energy and passion that drives small businesses and organizations. The community provides a host of tools and technologies that enable you to connect with your peers, exchange ideas and find answers to your questions about email marketing, online surveys and small business issues in general.

As a paying Constant Contact customer, you can bring email marketing and online survey tools to your favorite eligible community organization-at no cost to you! Through Cares4Kids you can help an organization reach new donors, publicize their good works, plan events-and use their precious funding to carry out their mission. It all starts with one quick application.. More than 900 worthy organizations have received free accounts on behalf of Constant Contact’s Cares4Kids program.

EG: Where does Constant Contact see the future of email marketing headed particularly with more and more people using mobile devices to open and access their email?

ZB: If you would have asked me this a year ago, I would have told you that it was going to affect open rates in a major way. The tracking mechanism that CTCT uses is a small image in the body of the HTML email. So this means that all text based email clients are tough to track. With the release of the iPhone, and many other mobile devices that can read HTML, I see open rates actually improving and becoming more accurate, as most smart phones will be switching to the HTML platform.

EG: What is the one hint or tip you could share that most people doing email marketing fail to realize or include in their email marketing campaign?

ZB: I think one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of email marketers make is that they fail to set the proper expectations at the outset of their email relationship with their customers and prospects. Being clear as to the content and frequency of the messages you will be sending is vital. Instead of saying “sign up for me email newsletter” say “sign up for my monthly newsletter.” Half of the battle in email marketing is validating your place in your recipient’s inbox, and setting/managing expectations is key to that validation.

EG: Thanks Zak!

45% of viewers find a video by direct navigation to a video site (i.e. going to YouTube and searching or clicking around the featured or related videos).

No surprise here given that over 10 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute that going directly to the video sharing sites and searching would be the top method of finding videos.

In terms of individual web sites referring traffic, no single source dominated, here are the top 20 individual referrers:

However, since there are a limited number of players in certain areas online, TubeMogul was able to infer that:

• 11.18% of all traffic comes from search engines
• 3.66% comes from social networks
• 3.19% comes from social bookmarking sites
• 0.63% derives from video search engines
• 0.05% is directed from Email/IM
• 80.88% makes up the rest of the referred traffic…of this mix it is almost completely made up of blogs from the thousands of different blogs they scanned.

Here are the really interesting facts here:

Digg beats StumbleUpon by nearly 0.4% for video referrals

I wouldn’t have guessed that. When I share videos on both social bookmarking sites my traffic from StumbleUpon is nearly triple the traffic I receive from Digg. StumbleUpon is my #4 traffic source for the website (which of course does include my blog posts) bringing in 9.97% of my site traffic while Digg is my #10 source of traffic (also including my blog posts) accounting for about 3.85% of all my site traffic. About half of my bookmarks are for videos while the other half are for blog posts (possibly even this one will end up on both). Of course this is just me and I am not profiling over 35 million videos for my statistics.

0.05% is directed from Email/IM

This I find staggering to be so low. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get people to share your videos is through email marketing – particularly to an existing base of people who have opted in to receive your email newsletter. In a recent post about integrating video into your email marketing campaign I found that there was a significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included in an email campaign. It sounds like a lot of people are missing the boat on this possible distribution channel.

Blogs sourcing most of the 80.88% of all referred traffic in this sample.

To those trying to make a video go viral, this should be telling you to reach out to relevant bloggers who could help you tremendously with the push for video views.

0.63% derives from video search engines

This is bad news to the ever increasing number of online video search sites that seem to keep popping up promising to help your video go viral or supposedly helping you search. With less than a 1% take, that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. I’ve long held that most of these sites have very little value to the online video producer – this study just proves my theory.

So the real take-a-way here…

…is engaging bloggers to work with you by sharing the video with them. If nearly 81% of video traffic is coming from blogs it only makes sense to try and engage relevant bloggers to share your video. The other real key that isn’t really discussed is to make sure you optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it can easily be found by those who are searching.

How many views make a viral video a success?

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?

Okay so Mike Langford (aka @MikeLangford) hates me as and selected me as a Twitter friend to take part in this 7 things list with his post. This little ditty has been going around though as Lyell Petersen (aka @93Octane) sent it to him and you can follow the train back from there…

If I deemed you worthy enough to pass this glorious honor on to you, and put its continued existence in your very hands (you! have! the! power!), please follow these care and feeding guidelines:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged

All right here we go…

1. I split my head open jumping over hurdles – but not the way you may think. We had to do plyometric bounding drills over hurdles set closely together my freshman year of college (few people even know that I ran track in college). Well I clipped my heel on a hurdle and fell. So the first thing you do when you fall is jump back up and hope nobody saw you, right? Well what I didn’t realize is that when I fell on the hurdle it had sprung up and was spinning in the air…and I stoop up into it leaving a gash over my left eye near my temple. It took 7 internal stiches and 9 external stiches to close it up. Now I just have a barely noticeable scar line over my eyebrow.
2. I was a history minor in college - when I started college I didn’t have a firm knowledge of what I wanted to do, but who really does? That’s the type A number crunching part of my personality. So I took a bunch of history classes as well as my art & design classes. Come senior year I learned I only needed to take a history survey class so I figured why not?
3. I don’t like football – I know sacrilege to some. I actually played football in high school for a couple of years…just didn’t have the passion for it. I can sit & watch parts of a game, just not in a group with a bunch of people yelling at the TV. Also after watching Tim Krumrie’s leg get sickeningly crumpled over and over again during the Super Bowl XXIII in slow motion I stopped watching. The only sports I follow religiously now are baseball & cycling.
4. I once had a giant dyed blond Mohawk haircut – That’s right. I also had my head shaved and my hair long & dyed black as well. What can I tell you…I was in art school! While no photos exist of the Mohawk here’s a funny one of me with my head shaved.
5. Once I was stalked by a Nile Crocodile – I was doing a graphics installation at the New England Aquarium after they were closed on an African lake exhibit. While installing some information card turrets in front of the Nile Crocodile exhibit I noticed that the 16′ Nile Crocodile slipped into the water in his tank and was gliding toward me. When I turned to look at the crocodile…it stopped completely still. So then I turned back to my work and noticed out of the corner of my eye that the crocodile was gliding towards me again! Not trusting the 3″ thick Lexan to keep the crocodile away from me I sped through the rest of my installations and got the heck out of there.
6. I developed photos for Ben Affleck before he was BEN AFFLECK – well he was still Ben Affleck and had been in a couple decent movies already but it was before Good Will Hunting was released. He used to go into a little boutique photo store I used to work at on Newbury Street and get his film developed. I also helped him find where to buy a Hasselblad Medium Format Camera and he invited us all to go to the Boston Premiere of Good Will Hunting which I unfortunately turned down.
7. This is the first time I have ever returned a chain mail of any form -  I normally get a bunch of these emails and prior to email actual snail mail letters which promise good luck or a horrible curse and they usually all get deleted. I thought this one sounded fun and Mike is a good egg so I decided to do this one for fun.

I hope you enjoyed this little bit of useless knowledge about me & my life and now the poor souls I am passing the baton to with their Twitter handles:

Nick Inglis (@nickinglis)
Ken George (@KenGeorge)
Josh Garner (@SEOFactor)
Adam Cohen (@adamcohen)
Tom Gastall (@tomgastall)
Danny Brown (@PressReleasePR)
Wahyd Vannoni (@manifest_mag)

Leave a comment below with the link to your 7 things post once you’ve written one.

My Very Warmest Holiday Wishes

5 Questions Interview: Mike Langford of Tweetworks

I have been giving regular seminars with Zak Barron of Constant Contact about how best to integrate email marketing with online video. One of the statistics I use is one I got from the Email Standards Project where their research showed that a “…screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link.” Of course being a video production company I latched onto these stats and used them to my benefit. I’ve seen these statistics used as part of Email Marketing Reports and also in a discussion I had on the Constant Contact User Community Forum…but then I wondered…what would my own research find? We already knew from our own monthly newsletters that we were getting really high click-throughs compared to industry standards and most were going to the new video that we sent out every month. Most of those click-throughs on our e-newsletters were also clicking on the screen-grab JPEG image (see “screen-grab sample image above) which “looks” like it will play but actually links to the video on our website rather than using the text link to that same video. Here were our cumulative statistics for our open rate and for our click through rates for 12 e-newsletters which amounts to several thousand emails going out:

Cumulative Open Rate: 48%

Cumulative Click Through Rate: 44%

So then on two occasions we decided NOT to include a video with a screen-grab link in our e-newsletter and instead sent out informative articles, upcoming events or blog posts. All good content…just no video. Our statistics for these two e-newsletters were:

Cumulative Open Rate: 47%

Cumulative Click Through Rate: 16%

It wasn’t a full 5x as often but including video in our campaigns was a very significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included. Another really interesting fact is that our open rate remained virtually the same which basically means there is a 64% decrease in the number of click-throughs on our e-newsletter when we do not include video.

I hope you find these statistics as interesting and useful as I did. Now my head hurts from all that math so I’m going to have to get back to doing something creative but with these statistics in mind…have you included video in your email marketing campaign? What have your results been? Please share your own results by commenting below or pinging this blog post.