Video in Email: How to Embed Video in Email

Posted by Sam Beamond in Email Marketing, Graphic Design, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Web Development, eNewsletters on Jun 29th, 2010 | one response

Today, the simple ability to upload videos to the web has created an influx of online video activity that has reached extreme proportions. This trend has been led by YouTube, Vimeo and other online channels. So now you have uploaded some video content to one of these networks and you want to show off your masterpieces or use them as a promotional tool. A quick way to reach your audience is via email. You can create a message and blast it off to your list in no time. In fact email messages that include the promise of video clip have a much higher open rate and click through statistics that a “regular” formatted email. These facts alone suggest that this is a great method for getting your freshly uploaded video out to the masses.

Unfortunately most email applications, either web-based or locally installed, will not allow you to take the video’s code and embed your video right into your email message. Instead you could opt for a screenshot or frame capture of part of your movie and embed the static image into your email message. This is better than no image at all but wouldn’t it be better if you could simulate the video and engage the reader with a better chance of them clicking through to your video?

Yes, But How Do I Simulate a Video Embedded in My Email?

While flv or other web-based video file formats cannot be embedded in emails, more standardized imagery can, such as gifs and jpgs. The wonderful element of gif images is that they can be saved as animated gifs. There are many pieces of software that will allow you to create an animated gif file some paid and some for free. A simple Google search will yield many results. I’ll leave it to you to sift through and find a solution that is right for you needs. With your new animated gif capable software installed, you will need to play your video and take a screen shot/frame capture at various intervals throughout your video playback. I would suggest no more than 10. Now take your frame captures, crop them to size and add them to a time line in your gif software. (Note, for added effect, I suggest leaving the video player frame around your screen shots/frame captures so that the email reader can see that the animation is indeed a video and not some random image sequence thrown in there. Playback of your animated gif will show a somewhat jumpy sequence of your video clip, that tells the story of your video while capturing the attention of the viewer.

Now that you video is in an abbreviated format and exported as an animated gif, you can freely place the file into your email newsletter just like you would a static image. Now once in place you can set your image to link to the live version of your video on youtube or wherever you placed it, when the user clicks the image (animated gif).

Drop me a note if you have any questions or comments!