Video in your emails?

Published April 24, 2008 by Mathew Patterson

The growth of services like YouTube and Vimeo, and the availability of cheap video cameras and editing software has created an explosion in the use of online video.

Your clients will start asking you soon if they can put their video into your emails, if they have not already. So can it be done? The answer is "no, not really". Technically, videos just don't work in email - most of the video players use Flash, which won't play in your email client.

That's probably a good thing in reality, because email inboxes are already very crowded and busy, so adding even a genuinely fascinating video is not going to be welcome.

However, email can be an excellent way to encourage people to visit your website and watch a video. Instead of trying to embed it right in the email, just take a static screenshot, and link that to your video page.

This really works - in the recent Email Standards Project newsletter, we did exactly that for our Gmail Appeal video (see the image above). We linked the screen grab, as well as providing a text link in a couple of other prominent places.

In our reporting, we can see that the screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link. People love to click on images, particularly images that look like they do something.

This is a really simple technique, but it can be a great way to convince your clients not to keep trying to embed the videos directly.

9 Comments

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  1. Nikc
    April 24, 2008 6:56pm

    rickrolled. ouch.

  2. Kyle James
    April 25, 2008 2:34am

    I think definitely the take away idea is to get people to come to your site to watch the video.  Create the call to action and get them to visit.  Besides once they watch the video (which is much easier to track on your site) maybe they will stick around and do something else on your site.

  3. David Levin
    April 25, 2008 10:03am

    I agree with you 100% that allowing email clients to play flash opens up pandora’s box for sure (even though it could be pretty cool at times). I like your idea of using at least an image showing a still frame of the video and then linking directly to the page that will start playing it.

  4. Jason Pelker
    April 26, 2008 5:18am

    I covered this topic last year. Alas, not many folks paid head to my advice…

  5. Anna Yeaman
    April 26, 2008 6:13am

    I posted on my site about how to send a video email, with a few examples:

    http://www.stylecampaign.com/html/videoemails.html

    I have been bugging all my email clients for a while about getting some web video (and some have actually listened to me:) They have seen great results, click through rates have more than doubled in some cases...grab a cheap camcorder like the Flip for $150 and you are set.

  6. Jason
    April 29, 2008 8:08am

    i’e been rick rolled!

  7. Bob Bachle
    September 9, 2008 7:33am

    We’ve been bugged to try to embed email for awhile now, and I dislike the idea for the same reason that I dislike spam - it violates the “rules” of relationship marketing, summarized as...demonstrating relevance, inviting participation, and providing value.  Email is best left to the invitation only, and marketers are missing the point to push further than this. 

    The clear-thinking folks at Emma call your screen-grab approach “video-ish,” which I also consider to be the best marketing approach to video.

  8. Sam Carpenter
    November 6, 2008 3:59pm

    Video email is the only way to go I am with a video communication company. The world is starting to use video email in our company we you send a video email it goes to our servers and is transcode for pc or mac, with no downloads or excutable files, listen all you guys can been be stuck in the past with the rules of relationships. Technology is just passing you by just get with the program. and it can be done for $ 9.95 a month and with a $79.99 logic tech web cam that video in HD.

  9. Ian
    November 19, 2008 6:57am

    @Sam Carpenter.....it’s not about being stuck in the past, it’s about not screwing up your relationships with customers!

    Anyway, I started a similar thread due to a company claiming to offer video in email, and it just isnt gonna happen:

    view the thread

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