We’ve seen more and more brands take advantage of MMS marketing by sending their customers video MMS messages. While this is a smart move—as videos can be far more engaging than just plain-text SMS messages—many brands are accidentally making a mistake that drastically reduces the chances of people clicking on their videos and taking action with a purchase.
Why Do Some Video MMS Messages Appear as Black Boxes?
Maybe you’ve received a text message where, instead of video with an enticing image, you see a video that appears as a black square. Not very enticing, right? The video looks more like an error than an actual video that you would want (or trust) to click on.
How Do You Fix These Video MMS Messages?
This actually isn’t an error on the part of a text message marketing platform or the text message marketer, although it may look like it to subscribers. Rather, it’s completely fixable by taking one simple step before sending the video MMS marketing message. And that step is to insert an image at the start of your video.
What’s happening when a black box appears instead is that the MMS message is pulling the first frame of the video for the video thumbnail. Since many videos fade from black or white into the actual video, the MMS message sends a black or white thumbnail. The only problem is, that does nothing to draw customers into the message. It’s basically a waste of valuable real estate in your video MMS message.
How to Choose an Eye-Catching Video MMS Thumbnail
Imagine the difference between a bright message with words like “sale”, “coupon”, or “today only.” Those words are much more eye-catching, and would make recipients want to check out the video or the special promotion. A black box wouldn’t draw people in, but a nice pair of shoes or a dream vacation? Using strategic images increases the likelihood of subscribers purchasing your product or service, which drives up revenue and profits, and gives you a much more impressive ROI on your video MMS messages.
So instead of automatically uploading your video to your MMS message, take a few extra minutes to create a thumbnail for your video. Use bright colors, active language, attractive products, or your logo. It will show up in your message, but disappear before people actually get into your video.
