Our inboxes are overflowing, and it feels like the emails never stop. Between spam, newsletters, and personal communications, everything seems to blend together. It’s no surprise that it’s a struggle to get your marketing emails noticed.
So how do you get your audience to open your emails instead of deleting them right away? Send a video.
Video is a powerful form of communication—and 89% of consumers want to see more videos. But sending videos in an email can be a pain if you don’t have the right tools and strategy. We’ll show you how to create an effective email video that gets recipients to open it, plus how to easily use Loom’s screen recorder to share videos in your emails.
Why use video in your email marketing strategy?
If you’re still not convinced email videos can turn the tables on your open rates, check out these compelling benefits for adding video to your email marketing strategy.
Video emails increase engagement
Including videos in your marketing and sales emails has a significant effect on engagement. Campaign Monitor found email videos resulted in a 65% increase in click-through rates, along with a 19% boost in open rates and a 26% reduction in unsubscribes.
Internal emails also benefit from video. Your coworkers are 75% more likely to watch a video than read an email, making this form of visual communication key for creating engaging employee training and improving internal communications.
Emails with videos are unique and memorable
Which do you think you’d remember in an hour, a block of text or a video? You’ll most likely remember the video—since our brains remember visual information 100 times longer than text-based information.
Video’s ability to convey compelling stories makes it a powerful marketing tool. Ninety percent of video marketers attribute an increase in brand awareness to video, and 87% say video directly improved sales.
Emails with videos are more personal
Did you know that eight out of 10 consumers ignore or delete brand emails at least half the time? This is true even for brands they love.
How do you get your emails to connect instead of landing in the trash bin? Personalization.
Videos effortlessly add personalization to your emails by giving your brand a face and personality. They establish trust and authoritativeness by providing a more intimate and in-depth look at who you are and what you do.
Braze, a customer engagement platform, recently discovered this when it started using Loom to create new video content to drive its marketing initiatives. Braze used Loom to record over 100 thought leadership videos, product demos, and client stories, which led to a boost in MQLs.
Video emails save time
A recent Microsoft report found that workers spend up to 8.8 hours on email each week, contributing to an overall feeling of not having enough time or energy to get things done at work.
Using embedded videos in your emails quickly conveys your main points in a digestible format. You can reach your target audience and keep their attention—even if your product, service, or offer is complex.
8 keys to creating effective video emails
Ready to send an email video? Here are a few tips for creating a compelling video marketing strategy that involves sharing videos through email:
1. Use high-quality audio and visuals
You’re working with visual content, so it makes sense that correct lighting for your video is crucial. After all, you want viewers to see the focus of your video. You also want to grab attention with the right mix of supporting B-roll, slides, and sketches.
Clear audio recording ensures your message gets across without any misunderstandings, while music and sound effects balance story pacing. Adding production value to your email video also helps viewers better understand and retain the information you present.
2. Tell a story
Don’t overlook your viewers. They’re more likely to engage with and remember your video if you use it to tell a compelling story—clear messaging and storyline are one of the top two qualities of engaging videos.
Storytelling can make even the driest content memorable, and it sparks emotions like inspiration and belonging.
3. Include a clear call to action
Tell viewers what action you want them to take by including a call to action (CTA) in your video email campaigns. Without a CTA, customers may want to purchase your product or learn more about your services, but won’t know how.
Include a clickable CTA button in your email video to show viewers how to quickly and easily take action. Loom AI even embeds a link or button for you with its Auto CTA function.
4. Optimize for delivery and response rates
It’s important to design your email video for engagement, but even more critical to optimize it so the email lands in your recipients’ inboxes in the first place.
In 2023, two major email clients, Gmail and Yahoo!, announced updated requirements for bulk email senders. These new requirements took effect in 2024 to prevent malicious emails and spam.
Both Yahoo! and Gmail now require bulk senders to adhere to the following rules:
Stay under the spam rate threshold of 0.30%
Include a visible unsubscribe link in each email
Enable recipients to unsubscribe in one click and honor requests within two days
Authenticate email accounts for better security using ARC, DKIM, DMARC, or SPF
If your company sends over 5,000 emails per day, you might see more of your emails land in the Spam folder, or even remain undelivered.
5. Use compelling subject lines
Your email subject line is your first chance to stand out in a crowded inbox. Email delivery platform Constant Contact advises that subject lines should be “informative and personal without giving everything away,” while adding urgency and inviting curiosity also positively impact the open rate. Additionally, including the word “video” in your subject line improves open rates by 6%.
That said, here are some examples to inspire you:
Video message from [Sender’s Name]
[Sender’s Name] just sent you a personally recorded video
[Recipient’s Name], ready to discover [Product]?
Why [Product]? I’ll show you in 30 seconds
Check out [Product], our newest addition
How long should your subject line be? It depends—Gartner found that lengthier subject lines can lead to higher open rates, provided they’re relevant and useful. If your email is headed to a small, specific segment of recipients, try A/B testing a longer subject line.
6. Keep your videos short
While the ideal video length depends on your audience and message, you should aim to keep your email videos under 60 seconds long. Piktochart even recommends trimming an email video down to 30 or 45 seconds.
If you can’t adequately share your message in 30 to 45 seconds, it might be worth taking a little extra time and bumping up your recording length to 60 seconds. Just don’t let things run longer than that, as engagement plummets between 60 seconds and five minutes.
7. Include closed captions
There’s a meme circulating that claims Gen Z and millennials can’t watch TV without captions turned on—in fact, over half of each generation prefers watching shows with subtitles turned on.
They might be onto something. Captions increase video views by up to 40% and improve the chances that viewers watch a video to the end by 80%. They also improve the accessibility of video content for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Captions improve comprehension and focus, with 42% of students using captions to improve their focus when watching videos and 52% noting improved comprehension. While you’re probably not sending an email video to students, it’s likely the same benefits apply to your customers and coworkers as well.
8. Provide value
If you’re going to make a promise in your video’s title or description—or your email subject line or body—you need to deliver on it. The most common reason people stop watching a video is because it doesn’t deliver the expected information, followed closely by boring content.
If your topic doesn’t naturally have viewers on the edge of their seats, you can generate excitement and deliver value through storytelling and high-quality visuals. Create a more personal video by showing your face.
4 inspirational examples of video emails
Not sure what a video email should look like? The sky’s the limit, but here are a few video email marketing examples to get your brainstorming session off the ground.
1. Professor Hawks: Replace lengthy emails with a quick Loom
Long emails are the worst. Between lengthy sentences and heaps of paragraphs, these messages often add confusion and waste time while your audience tries to wade through the avalanche of information tucked below your subject line.
Professor Paul Hawkinson is here to show you a better way. Instead of wearing out your keyboard composing long emails, add a Loom video link.
Loom videos are instantly shareable the moment you finish recording. Simply pop the URL into your message—if you and your audience use Gmail, a video thumbnail even pops up.
Best of all, Loom email videos reduce the chances your message turns into a never ending email chain or yet another meeting. And because Loom captures your tone of voice, facial expressions, and screen, you reduce the chances of your audience misunderstanding what you meant.
2. Riverside: Show viewers how to use your product
Whether you’re welcoming new users or releasing a new product, visually showing customers how to use your product is much more effective than a wall of text. Recording a walkthrough and including it in an onboarding email like Riverside did allows you to address common questions. It also gives you a chance to show viewers how your product works. Simultaneously recording your webcam with a tool like Loom adds a friendly face to build trust in your brand.
3. Builder Designs: Improve viewer engagement with your content
Tease your latest content by recording and embedding a preview in a promotional email, followed up by a CTA, much like Builder Designs did here. Giving viewers some immediate access improves the chances they’ll engage with your content.
4. Spark: Share product use cases
Email platform Spark sent subscribers an email showing various use cases of its product. The newsletter promoted Spark’s features using a personalized video that showed the benefits and solutions it offers.
You can use a demo video maker like Loom to walk viewers through different ways current customers use your product or tailor it to a specific customer segment by addressing their common pain points.
How to send an email video with Loom
Ready to send a Loom video through email? Thankfully, there’s no need to wait for what seems like ages for your embedded video to load. Loom renders your videos instantly so they’re ready to embed the second you finish recording. Loom acts like a video hosting platform as well, and each recording is automatically uploaded to your library.
You can easily share an embedded video thumbnail in your emails by copying the link from your Loom library using one of two methods:
If you use Gmail
Download and install the free Loom Chrome Extension.
Create your account and enable Loom for Gmail in your account settings.
Once you’ve recorded your first video, click the link icon in the top-right corner of your browser window to copy the link.
Paste your video link into the body of your email and Gmail should automatically display it as an embedded thumbnail.
For all email platforms
This approach is ideal if your recipient doesn’t use Gmail, as it allows them to view your embedded video thumbnail on any platform.
Download and install the free Loom app for Chrome, iOS, Android, or desktop.
Create your Loom account and record your first video.
Click the Share button in the top-right corner of your browser window. You should see a pop-up with the options Share, Social, and Embed at the top. Select Embed.
Click Copy GIF thumbnail, then paste the thumbnail into the body of your email.
Elevate your email marketing strategy with Loom
Email isn’t going away. The number of emails sent and received daily is expected to reach 392.5 billion in 2026, and catching attention in a crowded inbox will be increasingly difficult. Sending an email video is one way to stand out from the crowd.
Using tools like Loom makes it efficient and easy to incorporate video into your email marketing strategy. You can easily copy and paste your Loom videos directly into your emails without waiting for attachments to load—or worse, the large video file size preventing your email from getting sent.
See how easy it is to send your next video email and delight your audience.