Videos in email: best practices

In recent months, adding video to your emails has threatened to go mainstream. And we finally have a broad consensus on how best to do it...

Don't let the coolness factor seduce you

While it's still somewhat edgy and cool to have online video, the buzz factor diminishes with each passing day. Video is no longer quite so cutting edge.

Before you add video to your emails, assess it like any other element of your content. Video in email must...

• ...serve a business purpose (build awareness, build engagement, better showcase products to improve sales, educate, etc.)
• ...deliver value to the recipients (a video of your new offices is not cool, not relevant and not valuable.)
• ...match the brand and business behind it. Amateur "talking head" videos are fine for little independents like me. Not so fine for big corporations with a brand to protect.
• ...display properly.

This last point was the hurdle for much of email marketing's history, but the consensus is that you should avoid video/email compatibility issues by putting the actual video on a web page and using the email to drive traffic to this page.

Get people to view the video

This is where creativity is required with the call to action that gets people to click on a link and view the video at the destination landing page.

While you can apply established copywriting principles to this call to action, most "video emails" now take the screenshot route. The call to action is a clickable image of the video:


Even better, a clickable image of the video as if it were ready to play:


(You'd want text links somewhere too for those unable to see the images.)

The Email Standards Project newsletter took this approach and reported that the "...screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link."

If you want to see some good examples, see this post from Dylan Boyd.

And David Baker suggests a creative alternative might be to use animated .gifs to simulate the start of a video and then encourage people to "click to continue viewing."

What about embedding the video directly in the email itself?

Despite various vendor claims to the contrary, I've yet to see any independent verification that this works effectively. As David puts it:

"I've seen many samples, and the vendors specializing in this claim they can deliver this experience, but I have yet to see them perform consistently enough in our test environments to suggest it to our clients."

Related post:
Videos in email: case studies and resources

Tags: email marketing, video emails, video in email

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