Embedding Videos into Emails?
Is it worth embedding a video in an email to boost your sales? The answer seems to be a simple ‘No’ at this point for technical reasons, although an obvious ‘yes’ to email marketing mashup with video advertising.
Pure (one of the top email and SMS marketing companies in the UK) has put together a ‘why not list’
- The user has to have the right player installed on their machine, which means the plug-in for the player has to be installed in the webmail user’s web-browser. There is no unified format and it’s even in question as to whether Flash ‘.swf’ files are the best delivery method.
- Emails need to be designed using HTML 4.0. However, this cannot stably use the <embed> tag, required for embedding video, as it was introduced for the current working model of XHTML 1.0. For the purpose of safeguarding the user, most email clients, whether Hotmail or Outlook, usually deem a message containing either <embed> or <object> tags as unsafe and block them. That’s if it hasn’t already been stopped at source during the mail exchange.
- Video embedded emails can have a negative impact on deliverability rates. If there are high volumes of emails being opened and viewed at the same time there will be an inevitable surge on demand for the sending server. This surge will slow down the overall send and any campaigns being sent by those sharing the same server.
What can you do?
Choose a static image from the video, put a play button on it and link the image to the video on your branded site (if you want to save on bandwidth, put the video on a video aggregator and embed it on your site).
Being able to pick a static image works especially great for SMB youtube videos where you face the extra challenge of having to overcome the automatic random choice of a video image and set the thumbnail (starting image) right.
In addition, if you are targeting an audience whose English skills are not so great, it is an inevitable must to add subtitles to your video, and indicate the promise of subtitles on the static image too by adding a legible subtitle at the bottom!
via itwales.com