3 Ways to Include Video Content in Email Marketing
by Mashum Mollah Marketing 22 March 2019
Do you want to send videos via email to your list? Including video content could potentially improve the effectiveness of your email marketing and increase open as well as clickthrough rates. But before you can enjoy the benefits, you first need to decide how you want to include videos in your email.
To put it simply including videos in email can be a bit of a challenge. In fact, there are three main options you can use, each with its pros and cons:
1. Sending video file attachments:
Although it may seem like the obvious way to send videos via email, sending video file attachments is actually the most difficult. Email servers have attachment file size limitations, so you won’t be able to send video files that are too large.
To be on the safe side your video files would have to be 10MB or less. While technically you could compress your video down to that, it would be difficult for any video that is more than several seconds in length.
2. Adding links to external videos:
Instead of actually inserting videos into an email, you can link to external videos on platforms such as YouTube, cloud storage, or even your own servers. On some email clients (e.g. Gmail) YouTube links will appear as embedded videos.
While not the most elegant option, it is an effective way to include videos that free you of any other restrictions. Instead of just adding a text link however you could add an image such as a video preview, and link from it.
Technically you could use an animated GIF instead of a normal image – but GIFs tend to have large file sizes, which makes it less advisable to use them.
3. Using HTML5 to embed videos in emails:
Some email clients support HTML5, and that allows you the option of embedding videos in your email as HTML5 videos. However not all email clients support it, so it won’t be visible to all recipients.
If you do use HTML5 to embed videos, you should always add a fallback in the form of a link. It will require a bit of extra code, but it will mean that should any recipients not be able to view the video embed – they can watch the video via the link.
The list above covers the main options that you can use to include videos in your email marketing. However, in some cases, you may want to be creative and derive other content from your videos that are more email-friendly. For example, you could convert FLV to MP3 online and extract the audio tracks from videos to send as a podcast of sorts.
At the end of the day, nothing is quite as effective as videos when it comes to marketing, however, and the engagement it provides is second to none. That makes it worth your while to explore each option and figure out which one you’d like to use to include videos in your email marketing in the future.
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