Can you embed video into an HTML email
Well, the quick answer is yes you can – but that’s only part of the story. Video sharing sites such as YouTube or Vimeo will provide easy to use embed code – this embed code can be pasted into the HTML code of the body of your email.
Whilst most modern email marketing software will allow this, the problem is that most email browsers that your recipient’s are using to view your emails on do not support this type of embed code.
For most recipient’s, they’ll see a black block or nothing at all. The technology used to provide the framework for most email browsers is quite old, also lots of user’s don’t upgrade to run the latest versions.
This means that whilst it’s possible to include video – it’s a risky strategy as most users won’t be able to see it.
Certainly, many of the big boys such as Outlook and Gmail do not support embedded video.
Interestingly, it has been suggested that some of these networks see embedded video as a security risk, because malicious code can be transported with the video embed code.
Some of these networks also see video content as marketing related and spammy. This means that supporting embedded video is not really a priority for them
So, should you not use video to support your marketing?
Well, you absolutely should use video to support your marketing. In recent years, we’ve all become used to seeing video content in marketing – for many people this the preferred method to receive content – rather than reading long articles.
So, how do you use video with your email marketing?
The best and most reliable way to do this is to host your video on a video sharing site such as YouTube, you can then link to this video from inside your mailer.
The tried and tested way to do this is to make an image of a still from your video, and link to it.
This has two significant advantages:
- Everybody will be able to watch your video, no matter what email browser or device they are using.
- Your email marketing software will record these views as clicks, so you can see exactly how many people are watching your video.
Summary
Ok, so whilst embedding video is not necessarily an option, it doesn’t mean you should rule it out. Using the image linking method really works and has some great benefits