Rich Media in Marketing

With so many emails, messages, websites, or even digital kiosks, how do you stand out to make your content count? The answer is Rich Media. According to Radicati Group, the consumer and business emails sent and received every day will exceed 281 billion in 2018. This is expected to increase to 333 billion by the end of 2022.

Rich media is a broad range of digital media that excites the sensory features of the viewer. It can be a static image, a GIF, a video, an animation, interactive banners, and even an audio snippet. Rich media marks its territory by creating interest and excitement for a product or service you are marketing by building interactive user experiences. You can use rich media in various ways on different platforms, including social media, mobile marketing, and email marketing, among many others.

According to Social Media Examiner, 37% of marketers find visual marketing to be the most important form of content for their business after blogging. Dell, using animation in one of their email campaigns, experienced a 103% increase in conversion rate.

Benefits of rich media for marketers

There are a variety of ways rich media is a marketing asset.

Greater interaction: Attractive and uniquely laid out messaging keeps the viewer’s attention longer than traditional media.

Increased calls-to-action: With video and other rich media, there is more than one place to offer additional, high-quality information and social media engagement. This helps capture your audience’s personal information so you can begin leading them through your sales funnel in other ways.

Trackability: The technology behind rich media allows marketers to track the various levels of engagement and interaction, including important metrics like the number of expansions, multiple exits, and video completions. By combining these metrics, brands and agencies can measure the success of advertising campaigns and the return on investment (ROI) of their ad spending.

Let’s dive in and understand where all rich media can build an impact.

Rich Media in Email marketing

Email marketing is the most reliable, scalable, and effective channel to reach your customers to date. But to make your emails more optimized and engaging, a rich media strategy is something that every marketer is following these days. Email marketing has evolved from plain text emails to rich HTML emails with images, GIFs, cinemagraphs, and videos that we all admire today. HTML in email lets you add background colors, text formatting, and a tabular structure, making an exciting and interactive experience for your customer to interact with them. This leads to an increased engagement rate, greater traffic, and higher ROI.

However, the strategy will vary for a B2B and B2C business. An effective B2B email marketing campaign should focus on positioning it as a thought leader in the industry. Knowing the industry of your subscribers is a great way to segment your email campaigns. For example, a business that sells car parts that send a testimonial video embedded email with actionable content would engage more subscribers than just reading a plain copy. Then again, you have to do A/B tests and figure out what works best for your business, whether it is a static image email or a video-embedded one. It’s also essential to follow guidelines to not get marked as spam, like adding alt text and title text are a must while using images. Make sure you maintain the text-to-image ratio at 80:20, so there are no deliverability issues.

Rich Media in WhatsApp Marketing

The average text message gets an open rate of around 98%. That is the reason why chatbots work so well too. And that is precisely the reason that makes WhatsApp the most engaging marketing channel on the planet. And with the capability of rich media messaging for WhatsApp, it enriches your message with images, video, audio, gifs, stickers, attachments, dynamic CTA, etc., opening up more ways for you to interact with your customers. And provide them delightful and memorable experiences.

For example, sending a cart abandonment message along with the product image increases the chances of conversion. Even the event reminders you sent, it can have a CTA of YES, No, or a reminder attached to it.

Unica Deliver provides an enhanced Whatsapp capability where the marketer can use WhatsApp pre-approved templates to send out messages to the customers. It allows for increased engagement as it’s another rich communication channel that is commonly used by customers on a daily basis.

Rich media in Ads

As a marketer or advertiser, you are always running ads to drive better CTRs (and, ultimately, revenue). CTR for a medium rectangle banner ad is as little as 0.13%, so it’s easy to say that audiences don’t like ads. However, According to a Vieodesign survey, 83% of people agree with the statement, “Not all ads are bad, but I want to filter out the really obnoxious ones.” Rich media ad has helped improve the advertising rep and get companies better ROI on their ad spend. In fact, one 2018 study found that rich media ads outperform standard banner ads by 267%.

There can be different types of rich media ads.

Banner Ads – They are usually fixed and incorporate dynamic elements like video, an image, or even a GIF. They are easy to create and welcomed by most users. There is another form of banner ads, expanding ads, which expands when a user takes a certain action – like the video will automatically start playing; pushdown ads and floating ads are all examples of Banner ads.

Interstitial Ads – They are full-screen ads that are generally displayed during the natural transition in a flow. They are very common in mobile apps.

Lightbox ads – They are the most interactive form of ads, with a combination of video and images to engage your customers. The user initially sees a small ad on the sidebar of the page, which, when interacted with, expands by dimming the entire screen, showing the full ad to interact with.

Wells Fargo developed a Tetris-inspired interactive experience to run together with streaming video content on desktop and mobile. It highlighted their new feature to track recurrent charges.

Rich media is a powerful tool for a marketer, providing a more engaging format of interaction for your customers or prospects with some easy-to-consume content through video or audio formats rather than through a traditional blog post or white paper, or eBook. Rich media can help you improve your engagement metrics, stand out, build a competitive edge, and build awareness. The investments you make will result in a profound impact.

To learn how you can use the include rich media under your marketing strategy with Unica, reach out to us, and we will be happy to help.