• by Jess Nelson , October 2, 2015

Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, made a splash at Advertising Week when she spoke about the importance of online video advertising and why brands should ditch traditional commercial ads to instead spend their advertising budgets on Facebook.

What wasn’t discussed was video’s ROI for all marketers and, perhaps especially so, for email marketers.

In conjunction with Sandberg’s appearance at Advertising Week, Facebook this week began rolling out new video and mobile-friendly features for profile pages.

But video isn’t just a useful advertising tool for companies that have the resources to compete for brands with advertising budgets big enough to afford a $4 million dollar 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl.

“Consumers today are driven by experiences, not products, and videos allow brands to capture experiences and tell stories in ways they can't with other ad formats,” says Vivek Sharma, CEO of email marketing company Movable Ink.

He says that videos are useful for companies of any size because they can be produced with big budgets or done more simply with animated GIFS and user-generated content.

“Brands that look to integrate video into email can capitalize on the high engagement of video coupled with email's strong ROI,” says Sharma.

Click-through rates increase by an astounding 200% to 300% when marketers include videos in their emails, according to Forrester. An introductory email containing a video also results in a 75% decrease of unsubscribes, per email marketing provider Eloqua.

Video content is easily shareable in social-media feeds and can potentially lead to an increase in recruitment efforts, inbound requests and customer retention.

“Video is a critical component for retailers of any size for both advertising and customer experience,” adds Mike Shelton, vice president of marketing for Vift, a video marketing solution for retailers.

Shelton says video can provide a more personalized experience and can offer retailers a new customer acquisition channel.

“Video is currently the most engaging form of digital content and can be utilized in multiple formats to help retailers engage their consumers, as well as grow their audience and brand,” says Shelton.

Companies that have incorporated video into their Web sites have also seen increases in engagement and conversion rates.

Visitors who view videos are more likely to buy a product and, on average, stay on a website for 2 minutes longer than those who don’t view videos, claims comScore.

A video on a homepage can increase conversion rates by 20% and a video on a landing page can exponentially increase conversion rates by 80%, according to ReelSEO and Unbounce, respectively.

The ROI of video content is expected to rise with the increase of mobile video traffic.

In years past, “this was much more of a challenge because of the inherently large file size of video clips and the corporate bandwidth required to play them back smoothly,” says Jim Panagas, director of PR and analyst relations at Kentico. “Those two hurdles have now been overcome which is why we are seeing such an explosion in the use of video by corporate marketing departments.”

Video now accounts for over half of mobile traffic, which exceeded 50% of total mobile data traffic for the first time in 2012.

By 2019, video content is predicted to be 72% of all mobile traffic and will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 66%, according to Cisco’s February Global Mobile Traffic Forecast Update: 2014-2019.