How to Increase Cold Email Open Rates With Personalized AI Videos

What are cold emails and why it is challenging to drive engagement

Cold emails refer to the process of reaching out to individuals or businesses with the intent of starting a conversation. Since the recipient is not subscribed to receive these emails, they are often set up to help businesses reach new audiences, generate leads and make a sale. While they are now a staple in most growth strategies, here’s why they no longer drive the same results:

• Overcrowded inboxes - From work emails to updates and notifications, professionals receive dozens of emails daily. This makes it harder for cold emails to stand out.
• Poor subject lines - In addition to choked inboxes, uncompelling subject lines lead to low open rates. You need to capture attention in seconds!

• Lack of personalization - Generic messages are considered spammy. If your message doesn’t address the recipient’s needs, interests or preferences immediately, you lose the chance to engage.
• Lengthy content - Long, text-heavy emails often overwhelm and even bore recipients. This either leads to them not reading the content in totality or ignoring it altogether.

While there are several email marketing best practices to follow, let’s tackle one that can help improve the engagement rate - videos in cold emails.

Benefits of adding videos to cold emails

Everyone is personalizing cold emails using the recipient’s name, job title, industry and similar parameters. Using videos in emails can make the proposition a lot more engaging and memorable; here’s why:

• Instantly grabs attention - Dynamic content is always more effective at capturing attention, getting your message noticed as soon as the cold email is opened.
• Simplifies complex ideas - Videos can break down complex ideas or messages and convey them with more clarity using text, animations, audio and other dynamic elements, helping the recipient understand your proposition better.
• Adds a human touch - Personalized videos can help humanize the cold emails, making the outreach feel more genuine.
• Improves brand recall - When your cold email instantly connects with the recipient, it ensures your message is ‘remembered’, leading to higher brand recall.
• Boosts click-through rates - Emails with videos have proven to increase the CTR by almost 300% across campaigns.

But just simply adding videos to emails is not enough - you need to personalize them.

Different ways to personalize videos in cold emails

Here’s how you can ensure even your videos are personalized to who you’re reaching out to:

1. Use recipient’s name or details

Weave in the recipient’s name, company, industry information and other details into the video content. This helps show that you have made the video just for them and have done your homework before reaching out.

2. Add self-recorded audio and video clips

With AI video generators like Videomagic, you can include a short, self-recorded audio or video clip to the content. This helps you add more context to the narrative and establish a personal connection with the viewer using your unique tone of voice.

3. Showcase custom solutions

Highlight different ways in which your product or service offers value to the recipient. You can even convert case studies and product use case documents into high-quality videos with a tool like Videomagic.

4. Dynamic visual elements

Use AI tools like Videomagic to help identify the content that can be used in videos - could be on a URL, document, PDF, presentation or a string of images. Including branded visuals can also help build better recall - especially if you’re in a competitive domain.

The good thing about using an AI video generator is you can A/B test rapidly - which is crucial when running cold email campaigns. From the way you present content to the information you include in the videos, scale videos in cold emails with ease by putting all your content to work!

If you use Videomagic, you can also leverage the Mailchimp integration to embed and track video performance in your cold campaigns.

Also read:Frequently asked questions about AI video generation