Video Adds Power to Milwaukee Electric Tool’s E-mail Marketing

To reach its audience of tradesmen—such as professional contractors, plumbers and electricians—the Brookfield, Wis.-based manufacturer and marketer of professional, heavy-duty power tools and accessories offers prospects and customers membership in its Heavy Duty Club. Members receive information on new products, rebates and promotions, testimonials, and other content via solo e-mails and e-newsletters.

"With the promotion of our products, two things dovetail together ... or actually, three things now," says Vicki Chiappetti, Milwaukee Tool's e-marketing project manager. "We have the e-mail marketing piece; we have the social piece; and then we have great content, which we enhance with videos."

For the past year or so, the B-to-B marketer has been building demand for its distributor-sold products by incorporating product and product testimonial videos into its online marketing program, specifically its e-mail marketing campaigns. With the help of e-mail and one-to-one marketing services provider ExactTarget, Milwaukee Tool developed an e-mail template that draws on the branding elements of the marketer's video channel on YouTube, called Milwaukee Tool TV. In the e-mails, a laptop graphic serves as the video window with a "click to play" arrow on it; near this graphic is an image of whichever Milwaukee Tool product is being promoted. When recipients click on the product image, it takes them to the product detail landing page, which provides features, technical specifications, application photos and videos, cross-sell/upsell offers, etc. If they click on the video screen shot in the e-mail, it directs them to the video on YouTube that also links back to the product detail page.

Why provide an indirect route to the video? "I've been doing e-mail marketing since, I don't know, 2002, and I just know what kind of bandwidth a server will take when you have, let's say, a thousand of your closest friends hitting it at the same time," Chiappetti explains. With the Milwaukee Tool TV channel on YouTube, "it can handle any kind of rush hour traffic that a campaign provides for us. The user experience is then seamless. And we can have [the videos] in HD."

For a related reason, Milwaukee Tool—and most other marketers using video in e-mails—does not embed the entire video into its e-newsletters. "That would be, I think, painful for some [subscribers] who don't have the bandwidth," she says.

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