Grow Subscriptions for Your Streaming Service with These Email Marketing Best Practices

By Chris Smith on July 28, 2018

As a professional content owner, so much of your time and energy is dedicated to creating amazing video content, building your audience and launching your video streaming service.

Now, it’s time to grow your subscriber base and today’s consumers have an endless number of options at their fingertips so you must find innovative ways to stand out and connect with your audience.

Whether you have an established streaming video service or you are getting ready to launch a new video product to market, driving and retaining subscribers is a challenge for video businesses at any stage, which is why your marketing strategy is so important.

There are are a number of channels and tools available to help drive awareness for your brand and content, from organic promotion to targeted paid ad campaigns on social media. While these are all important channels, the fact is that when it comes to converting your viewers into paid subscribers, email outperforms display advertising and social media advertising combined.

Why is email so important?

Your audience’s inbox is the best place to communicate with them. Not only do 94% of People in the U.S. check their email inbox every day, but it’s also most consumers preferred means of communication from brands. Your email subscribers are expecting to hear from you and they’ll be focused on what you have to say. If you aren’t already - start taking advantage of email marketing as a tool to grow (and retain) your subscribers!

But before you hit “send” on your next email campaign, be sure you are following these best practices to send emails that drive new paid subscribers and keep your current subscribers engaged and happy.

Always include a clear & clickable call to action 

What’s the goal of sending the email? You want to have a clear (and clickable) call to action for readers, whether that is watching new content, downloading your app or signing up for a subscription. Always keep messages short and to the point and don’t include more than a single call to action.

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This email from Zype’s fitness customer, Our Body Electric, does a great job in this email of keeping their call to action focused and clear. The goal of this campaign is clearly getting users to download and use their updated mobile app!

To increase conversion, consider creating landing pages dedicated to your unique selling points. If you were to click on the “CHECK OUT obe REPLAY” button on the email here, it would take you to this landing page instead of their homepage. This page was designed specially to sell users on why they should sign up for a subscription and makes it super simple subscribe right there.

Segment and automate your list

As a rule of thumb, don’t send the same email to everybody on your list. In order to be effective and send people messages, they *actually* want to read, break your list into smaller lists based on factors such as:

  • Level of engagement
  • Consumer type (i.e. paid subscribers vs. canceled subscriber)
  • Type of content viewed previously

By segmenting your lists, you’ll be able to deliver more personalized and relevant messages to your audience, as well as help to increase your open and click-through rate.

Luckily, email automation tools make it easy to segment your list, as well as automatically send specific emails to users based on an action they take. Whenever someone signs up for a subscription, you can automatically send them a ‘welcome’ email, followed by an email with content suggestions to get started a few days later.

To learn more, we wrote a post all about using Zapier to automate your email marketing efforts, check it out here.

Keep it interesting and visually appealing

The way your email looks does make a difference in how effective it is. You have amazing video content, your emails should be the best reflection of your brand and content. Invest in designing a branded, beautiful email template to ensure that you always send emails that are visually appealing and engaging. We like to use reallygoodemails.com as inspiration.

While you should never be afraid of sending an email to your list, don’t send anything that’s not providing your recipients value, otherwise, they’ll stop opening your email and eventually unsubscribe. That said, it’s also important to give people the option to unsubscribe in every email you send. As long as you are sending valuable content, your list won’t be at risk of shrinking and you’ll always be confident the people on your list want to hear from you.

Don’t embed videos

The goal is to get people to watch your content, why wouldn’t you embed them directly into the email you are sending? Don’t! Not only does video make your email much less likely to be delivered or end up in the spam box, it’s actually a far better experience for your viewers to simply include a thumbnail preview in the email and send them to watch the content on your site. At the end of the day, the goal of email marketing is to drive people back to your site to either watch your content and/or sign up for a subscription!

Enable tracking and A/B test subject lines

Email marketing will be an ever-evolving process for your content and brand. It’s important to experiment with new campaigns and find out what works and what doesn’t. Always A/B test your subject lines and notice what type of copy correlates with more opens or clicks, then use what you learned to improve your next email campaign. You’ll often find you are surprised at what drives the most results.

If you are using other channels to promote your brand (and you should be), then it ’s important to be able to see which channels are driving the most traffic and where. You can use Google Analytics UTM Builder to create and attach unique parameters to your links so you know if a new subscriber came as a result of your own email marketing, a partner’s website, or a paid social campaign.

Send your next email campaign! 

You’re now ready to leverage email to grow and engage your subscribers in the most targeted and effective manner.

Connect your video with viewers, everywhere.