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Using video in your email marketing

Published: 18th December 2020
Video is a great way to get your message across to a demographic who just don’t have the time or the inclination to read lots of text. Nowadays, most of us fall into this category, we are all on the go and have little time.

Also, the volume of emails that we receive means that the time that we are investing in reading each one is getting smaller and smaller. Another factor that affects this is the fact that lots of us are viewing mobiles on our smartphones - this means that reading text can be a frustrating experience.

So using video offers a great way to get your point across in a way that doesn’t require lots of effort of time of your viewer. It also adds a great visual element and the added attention grabber of movement.

With the massive growth of video sharing sites such as YouTube over recent years, we have all become accustomed to viewing short videos to learn something, be entertained or to research something we are looking to purchase.

So if you aren’t already using video - it’s a great time to get involved. With modern smartphones, it’s so easy to capture professional-looking video and audio without needing additional audio or video devices.

The limitations of email browsers


If all of this seems really easy to do so far, well it is but however, there are limitations of email readers that we need to be aware of and find a workaround.

One of the most popular email readers is Microsoft’s Outlook, it is the default email viewing platform for millions of us. There is a problem though, Outlook, much like most of the popular email readers don’t support the direct rendering of video inside an email.

This really is because video has become very popular very quickly and the big email browsers such as Outlook are using technology that is very old. This means that the framework that it uses simply isn’t capable of playing video reliably.

Some of the more recent updates to some email readers have included the ability to directly render video. Certainly at the time of recording this video though, using directly rendered video inside an email is still very hit and miss.

There would be nothing worse than sending out a campaign, that is based around the inclusion of video and lots of recipients just see an empty white space.

So, does this mean that it’s best-avoiding using video inside your email marketing? Well, as we’ve outlined, directly rendering video is just to problematic to consider using it in this way, but you hit the skip button, there is a rock-solid reliable way of accurately presenting video with your email marketing

How you can use video with email blaster


Inside the email blaster software, you’ll have access to a great easy to use design editor. This makes it really easy to design great looking emails without any prior experience or knowledge of coding for email. It's all based on click and drag, so you simply drag and drop design elements into place a populate them with your images and text.

One of the areas that we’ve found a reliable solution for is how to present video with your email marketing, as we’ve previously discussed directly rendering of video is still a bit sticky.

Your source video will need ot be hosted on a video sharing site such as YouTube, Vimeo or similar, these sires will automatically create a sharing url for your video. This is the address that you video lives at.

Inside the email blaster design editor, we’ve created a video block for you to use. All you need to do is drag and drop the video block into your email, where youd like you video to be displayed. Then you just paste in the sharing URL. The software will then do all of the heavy lifting for you.

It’ll create an image of your video from the Thumbnail published on YouTube, it’ll then add a play button, which you can style over the top of this image. This then creates a click through to the source of the video to play it.

This means that the playing of the video is handled by YouTube - not the email reader. It means that everybody will be able to view the video without the restrictions of the email reader - as YouTube is playing the video - not Outlook.

Summary


Working with video inside your email marketing has never been easier. Using the email blaster software to present your video in a stable reliable format is a great way to utilise this type of media.

Try it with your next email marketing campaign, we’ve seen email campaigns that use video attract some really great rad and click through stats. Video is a great way to get your point across in a viewer-friendly format.

If you are not already part of the email blaster community - then you are welcome to open a free account and try using video in your next campaign.
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