My MarketingSherpa e-newsletter landed the other day. Students of email marketing (and video producers) may want to check out their lead story about how adding video to an email marketing campaign scored a larger conversion rate. Let’s face it, folks L-O-V-E video on the Internet. But in this case I don’t quite get why it worked.

The case study is about a florist that regularly uses email marketing. In addition to offering the usual photos of flowers, this time around they did two things relating to video. First, they bought 15 seconds of stock video of tulips, and they provided a link to that footage in the body of the email. Second, they included the word “video” in the email subject line. Aside from mentioning video in the subject, they also used some good copy to call folks to action in the email headline. OK, launch email.

Conversions—which in Web analytics speak means sales coming from that email campaign—jumped from the usual 1.35% to 2.8%. Nice, particularly since they learned that using “video” in the subject line seemed to dissuade folks from opening the email. Usually 16.5% of recipients open the email, but this time only 14% did. Perhaps they were afraid they might open a large embedded video file or even a virus. So that leaves us with fewer folks opening the email, but more actually buying. Thank you, stock tulip footage!

And now I’m back to why I don’t get it. To sum up, we just learned that 1) users are willing to make the extra click to see tulip video, and 2) are swayed by a video of tulips more so than by a single attractive photo of tulips. They’re flowers, people, they don’t move!

Oh, the sweet promise of Internet video.