By including video in email you humanize your brand, increase trust and ultimately you’ll increase the response rate and engagement of your email campaigns. With that said, there are a number of big misconceptions about how video and email work together and the software tools needed to create successful video emails.
One of the biggest video in email misconceptions is that, to get video and email to work together you can just drop a video embed code into an HTML email and it will playback in Gmail or Outlook. We wish it was that easy, but it almost is. First, video will not playback in email clients like Gmail or Outlook. Some marketers trick these email apps by creating a animated GIF that looks like a video sitting in the email body. True video does not playback in email, but rather needs a playback page within a browser. Read further an we’ll explain how this works.
To create engaging and uplifting video emails, follow these three things:
- Control the viewer experience – From the moment the contact opens your video email and clicks play, to they finish watching the video you want to have control.
- Video playback on a page you own and control – Retain your branding throughout the viewing experience, make sure the video playback occurs on a webpage that you own and control.
- Measure video engagement and performance – Make sure you are constantly measuring the video’s performance in addition to email sends, opens, clicks. Form video playback to completion rates make sure you can associate this data with individual contacts.
From a technology and resource perspective you’ll need these key ingrediants:
- Great high quality video content that your team produces – By this point we assume that you have video content to place in an email. If you don’t, read our articles on creating a video content strategy.
- Landing page creator or website toolset – You’ll need to build a video playback page, so any HTML5 website builder or marketing automation platform should provide the appropriate tools.
- Email marketing software – To send the video email, you’ll of course need an email marketing or marketing automation platform.
- Online video platform – You’ll need a video platform besides YouTube or Facebook to host and stream you’re video.
How to pull it all together:
- Upload your video to the online video platform
- Generate a video player
- Create a video thumbnail (image of the video player to be placed in the email)
- Create your email copy
- Then tie them all together through linking
The next step is to make sure everything is linked together nicely:
- Create your video playback page and embed your video player.
- Drop your video thumbnail into your email copy and link it to your video playback page.
If everything is set up correctly, you should have just created an HTML5 email with an image of a video thumbnail linked to a landing page with the embedded video player. When the contact opens the email they will then click the video thumbnail which will load the video in the browser for playback. Next you can fine tune your video emails by making sure the video player on the playback page is set to auto-play and testing various thumbnail types.
There are various video software platforms that make video in email very easily and seamless. To learn more visit our directory here.
