Have you tried to incorporate videos into the marketing emails that you send out? It can boost their effectiveness, and lead to higher conversion rates if you do.
The one problem that you may face is that adding videos to email marketing isn’t as easy as it sounds. While there are a few ways it can be done, none are perfect and each has its own limitations.
Attach Videos in Emails
Adding a video as an email attachment may sound like a good idea—but it is actually the most difficult. Every email server has a specific attachment file size limitation that can be anything from 10MB to 50MB.
It should be noted that even if your email server’s file size limitation is high, if the recipient’s is not the email will bounce. In other words if you want to be on the safe side you would need to make sure the videos you attach are below 10MB.
Technically it is possible to compress videos by reducing the bitrate to keep them small, but it will have to be a very short video. On top of that it will affect the video quality and cause compression artifacts to appear—which isn’t ideal.
Link to External Online Videos
Arguably the most popular way to add videos to email marketing is to link to external online videos, typically published on YouTube or your website.
Although this may not sound ideal, it is actually a very versatile option. It will overcome the attachment file size limitation of email, and you won’t have to worry about compatibility or other issues either.
While you could just use a standard anchored or unanchored text link, for best results you may want to attach the link to an image. The image can have a ‘play’ icon on it to provide a visual hint that it is a video they can click on to play.
If you want you could add the link to an animated GIF that mimics a ‘video preview.’ However, this is a bit more difficult, and the file size of animated GIFs can get quite large and will need to be optimized.
Embed Videos in Emails
Embedding videos in emails the way that you would if you were publishing them online may seem like an easy and attractive option, but it requires HTML5 support.
Unfortunately as things stand not all email clients and platforms have HTML5 support, and on average only about 50% of email users can view embedded videos. Suffice to say if you use this option to add videos to email marketing, only half of the people on your list will be able to watch the video.
Seeing as that is far from ideal, you may want to use a fallback if you do choose to try to embed videos in emails. For example you could embed a video that will play in email clients that support HTML5, but display an image that links to an external online video for clients that do not.
Final Words
Overall the ‘safest’ way to add videos to email marketing is by linking to external videos. It may not be the most polished, but it will guarantee that your videos can be viewed—which is crucial if you want to reach a wide audience.
That being said you should now have a better sense of all the options that you can pursue. If you do choose to attach emails, you should compress them first—and for example you could use Movavi Video Converter for Mac to convert AVI to MP4 Mac.
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