Video prospecting is one of the best ways for sellers to stand out in a busy world.
If you are selling any type of product or service, chances are you are competing against other people for your prospects' attention.
This means that the modern day seller needs to get creative in order to stand out from the crowd and cut through the noise.
One way to do this is through video.
Video prospecting has long been used by sellers as part of their outbound process.
When done well, video can skyrocket both response rates and meetings booked.
Check out our customer Warmly, who used video to land a whopping 5 meetings in a day, using Sendspark videos 👀
Or our own CEO, Bethany Stachenfeld, who started to include video as part of her outreach on LinkedIn, and saw a dramatic increase in connect and response rates.
Video works.
So why aren't more people using it?
One of the reasons is that video creation is perceived as taking A LOT of time to create and set up.
This is not true (peep our Dynamic video feature 👀, which enables you to send personalized video at scale in minutes)
But another reason, and one of the reasons you clicked on this article is the perceived issue with deliverability of emails containing videos.
Do videos kill deliverability?
Is it a death sentence for outbound sequences to have videos embedded in them?
In the rest of this blog post we will unpack this topic, and hopefully provide you with peace of mind about including video in your day to say sales processes.
(TLDR video does not impact deliverability)
In order to unpack this topic, we hit up Ruari Baker, CEO and Founder at Allegrow to get a fair, knowledgeable and impartial view on the topic.
Ruari knows a thing or two about deliverability, with Allegrow providing a software that helps sellers reach the primary inbox of their prospects rather than the spam folder.
If you are looking for an email deliverability expert, you can't get much better than Ruari.
Things that Impact Email Deliverability
There are multiple reasons your emails might be blocked by a contact’s email server or land in the dreaded spam folder like this:
The worry most sellers have is that the list of high ‘spam risk’ activities is continuing to increase as buyers' inboxes become more full and filters become stricter.
Without looking at an individual’s specific use case - the main aspects of your email set-up and execution that impact deliverability can be summarized in these five categories:
1) Sender Reputation
This is essentially like a credit score inbox providers calculate for both your domain and sending IP separately to gauge how risky the emails you send to inboxes are likely to be. This score is calculated based on past email behavior, which means the past behavior of your team is going to impact future deliverability results. So if past sequences have been reported as spam by lots of recipients or received high bounce rates - you might have a clean-up job on your hands. The example below shows this being measured across an entire team:
2) Content
Email providers are constantly comparing the content of your incoming email to content that their user base has disengaged with or reported as spam. This is why optimizing your content style to be; concise, targeted, focused on the reader, and free of unnecessary links/attachments is vital for great inbox placement.
3) Email Authentication
Authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI show recipients that your message is authentic and hasn’t been intercepted or spoofed in any way. Having these protocols in place is a clear step to improving your deliverability and making your email less likely to land in the spam folder.
4) Contact Risk & Frequency
Simply put, bounces and spam reports make you look like a spammer and mean more future emails are delivered to spam. Is this your contact data providers fault then?
Not usually! Just because an email contact exists, it doesn’t mean that they are the best fit to cold email. Therefore, picking the safest contacts and making a deliberate effort to prospect a contact in a different manner if they have a history of producing bounces to sales emails or manual spam reports, is the best way to minimize spam risk and maximize engagement.
Gradually increasing email frequency, especially from a new domain, can help build a positive sender reputation and avoid having your emails blocked from delivery.
5) Engagement
Engaging email recipients is a huge factor in maintaining deliverability. Why would email providers place your message in the primary inbox if people aren’t getting value from your emails?
In order to maintain high engagement, you should benchmark the sequences your team conducts. Prioritize sequences that are above benchmarks while closing/updating sequences that are lower than these benchmarks:
- Email response rates on a per-email basis of 3% or more.
- Overall positive email response rate of 1.7% or higher.
- Top-line email response rates (on a per-contact basis) of above 12%.
- Open rates of above 40% (although this metric can be more volatile based on market segment).
- Bounce rates lower than 2.8%. (As context, average bounce rate on automated emails is 0.40%, so being above 2.8% is a clear ‘red flag’)
- Opt-out rates below 1.1%.
Even though the expectations of email providers is always changing (like any field in technology) - the most important principle to reach success over the long term is being proactive rather than reactive around diagnosing and fixing issues with your sequence success. Most of the worst issues we’ve seen teams experience with deliverability stem from allowing complacency to creep in.
Does Video Impact Email Deliverability?
At Allegrow, we’ve analyzed over 80 million emails for inbox placement. This means monitoring what’s getting filtered into spam folders vs the primary inbox where recipients can see your message.
There’s no argument that it’s a long-standing deliverability best practice, to reduce the number of links in your emails to reach the primary inbox. However, before you delete videos from your sequence, remember it’s not as straightforward nowadays as saying: less links = better results.
We’ve seen with multiple clients - that a high-quality (personalized) video will engage prospects more and improve your overall sequence results (and remember - engagement is foundational to long-term deliverability).
Including video can also help your content improve in other areas that would otherwise impact deliverability negatively (like avoiding spammy keywords, extensive copy, or additional ‘nudge’ emails).
So from a balanced standpoint, there are both pros and cons of video in outreach emails. But truly great and engaging personalized video inside a sequence can have a net-positive impact on sequence success and make your outreach more sustainable due to higher engagement.
For optimal deliverability, while utilizing video in your email sequences, you can follow this approach:
- Ensure you’re utilizing the best practices we discussed today on points 1-5 of this article so that you have a strong foundation for deliverability.
- Place the email step which includes video as the second (or later) email in your outreach sequence (inside an existing thread). This means you should have already ‘anchored’ your position in the primary inbox.
- Follow the guidelines covered in this article to ensure the videos you’re sending prospects are truly awesome.
- Occasionally, run A/B tests on the sequence step you’ve included a video on to see how it’s impacting the overall reply and open rate at that stage of the sequence.
In summary, a bad video will hurt your deliverability and come across as spammy, but a great video will improve your sequence success and deliverability. It all comes down to quality.
How to Create a Quality Video
You heard it here first folks, video does not impact email deliverability if the video you create is one that is considered “quality”.
So what goes into the creation of a “quality video”.
Here at Sendspark HQ, we are experts when it comes to sending a good quality video, with over 1.1 million videos sent by our users (yes you read that right).
Here is what you can do to make sure your video has the best chance of being watched by your prospects (and if you want to go even deeper check out our video prospecting guide)
1. Create a script before you send
One of the biggest issues people run into when trying to record videos is the lack of proper preparation which can lead to rushed videos that fail to miss the mark. A good way to get around this is to spend time crafting a script before you hit record on your video. Included in a “good” script should be:
- Who you are
- An observation you have
- How your product can solve a pain point for them
- Call to Action
What might this look like in reality?
Let's say you are selling video prospecting software to a Head of Sales at a B2B tech start up, your script might go like this:
"Hi (x),
Was just on your website, and looks like you are selling primarily into CFOs.
CFOs often ignore cold email, so you need something which is going to cut through the noise and grab their attention.
Video has a 20% higher likelihood of getting a response than a cold email.
At Sendspark we enable your teams to send personalized video at scale.
Worth a chat? You can book time on my calendar below"
Simple, effective and to the point.
2. Personalize the video
Sending a generic, vanilla video is just as impactful as sending a generic, vanilla cold email.
If you don't put any effort in, you are unlikely to get any results.
As with cold email, personalization is key when it comes to creating a video.
A few tips that you can use to personalize the videos you are sending out, include recording over their website, or a demo of your product.
Additionally, and to make things a little easier, Sendspark comes with the ability to create dynamic videos, which enable you to send personalized videos at scale.
With Sendspark, simply record one video, turn on our voice cloning functionality, upload a list of contacts, and let the tool create personalized videos at scale.
Take a peek of how it works below:
- Record video and turn on “Voice cloning”
- Upload Contacts and generate AI personalized videos
- Create a video with a personalized video and introduction immediately
- Add to the sending platform of your choice and send out
The Impact of Video on Email Deliverability
In a sea of generic cold email, and ineffective outbound strategies, video can be one of the most effective ways to cut through the noise.
Despite its effectiveness, some sales teams have shied away from using video, fearing it might harm email deliverability.
In this blog post, we debunk this misconception, clarifying that video does not affect deliverability—if the content is engaging and garners clicks. We also provide several straightforward tips to enhance your video prospecting efforts and secure responses from your prospects.
If you are looking to send personalized videos that work, be sure to check out Sendspark's dynamic video functionality, also be sure to visit Allegrow to ensure that all your outreach ends up in the inboxes of your prospects.
