Embedding YouTube videos in Emails

Adrienne Figus

Have any of you done this?

My org has been uploading new Youtube clips and linking to them in our newsletter emails, and we currently have a page on our site that links to the videos. I recently discovered the youtube WYSIWYG component, and I've been playing around with it, with the goal of replacing our static page of linked screenshots with a pagebuilder page with our Youtube videos embedded, so our constituents don't have to leave the site.

This seems promising, but I'm also curious about embedding videos in emails- our newsletter, welcome series or perhaps a new email campaign focusing on our videos. What are the downsides to this/ is it a good idea at all? For example, can it lead to our emails being marked as spam? I've only done a very preliminary test, but the one that I've tried worked wonderfully when I sent myself a test, but then when I tried to forward that test to a colleague the videos disappeared. Is this just something that happens, or was it caused by my Outlook settings or something else entirely?

Thanks,

Adrienne

Adrian Cotter

Hey Adrienne,

You can try just plopping a youtube into email, but my guess is that the number of email clients and web based email apps that actually support it will be not be that great. But I couldn't find any easy breakdown of support though among different clients web or otherwise.

Here's another way to do it, but I can't imagine it being practical, embedded base64

According to a marketing sherpa study it is definitely worth trying.

Adrienne Figus

Adrian Cotter:

Hey Adrienne,

You can try just plopping a youtube into email, but my guess is that the number of email clients and web based email apps that actually support it will be not be that great. But I couldn't find any easy breakdown of support though among different clients web or otherwise.

Here's another way to do it, but I can't imagine it being practical, embedded base64

According to a marketing sherpa study it is definitely worth trying.

Thank you for the links- the base64 embedding looks way too involved for me, but- interesting all the same.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Sally Heaven

Adrienne Figus:

Thank you for the links- the base64 embedding looks way too involved for me, but- interesting all the same.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

I think in general that embedding videos in emails is fraught with complications because, as you say, they don't always work. I'm actually surprised to hear that it worked well in a test message to your Outlook - I'd recommend testing with Gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol, and so on as well if you are able. Since most of those are web-based clients you may have a different result.

Anyway, the best practice I've always heard is to put a screenshot of the video in your email and to ask people to click through to view the video, either on YouTube or on your own site.

The not being able to forward piece would concern me, since people forward links around quite a bit and it's key to making a video go viral. Forwarding a link seems like it would be much less error prone than forwarding an embedded video to many different email clients and having it not work. You don't get a second chance or even really know about it when that kind of error happens during forwarding, and that can translate to a lost opportunity.

My two cents!

Adrienne Figus

Sally Heaven:

I think in general that embedding videos in emails is fraught with complications because, as you say, they don't always work. I'm actually surprised to hear that it worked well in a test message to your Outlook - I'd recommend testing with Gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol, and so on as well if you are able. Since most of those are web-based clients you may have a different result.

Anyway, the best practice I've always heard is to put a screenshot of the video in your email and to ask people to click through to view the video, either on YouTube or on your own site.

The not being able to forward piece would concern me, since people forward links around quite a bit and it's key to making a video go viral. Forwarding a link seems like it would be much less error prone than forwarding an embedded video to many different email clients and having it not work. You don't get a second chance or even really know about it when that kind of error happens during forwarding, and that can translate to a lost opportunity.

My two cents!

Thanks for the input- it pretty much goes along with my intuition on the subject. To be honest, I was just shocked to find out that I could do it at all, and I'm interested in finding out why or how such a thing mught be of use. For our constituency I think that automatically-playing videos in their inboxes would be a major turn-off. Also as you mentioned, a good portion of the benefit we get from our emailers is from constituents forwarding them, so no forwarding of videos makes the whole thing a lot less potentially useful.

David Hart

Adrienne Figus:

Thanks for the input- it pretty much goes along with my intuition on the subject. To be honest, I was just shocked to find out that I could do it at all, and I'm interested in finding out why or how such a thing mught be of use. For our constituency I think that automatically-playing videos in their inboxes would be a major turn-off. Also as you mentioned, a good portion of the benefit we get from our emailers is from constituents forwarding them, so no forwarding of videos makes the whole thing a lot less potentially useful.

Here's an article that I found very useful on the topic

Corey Pudhorodsky

I just ran into another great article about embedding video in email messages that I thought would be helpful to share here:

http://theemailwars.com/2009/07/06/is-there-a-workaround-to-video-in-email/

It's similar to the strategy shared in the link that Dave shared but it builds upon the method of embedding an image by using an animated gif image.  As outlined in the article:

But what was suggested on this panel was the use of an animated GIF.
Now not quite video but it does a similar job. What she told us was
that most inbox clients only allow 10 frames per second in a video in
email, where to have true video you need at least 30 frames per second.
So by using a simple animated (multi-layered) gif in the email they
could simulate the experience of video in almost every email client.

There's also a great example included in the post about how REI is doing this.  The example they share is located here:

http://www.rei.com/email/gearmail/gm022709_vid.html

Hope this helps, I'd love to hear if anyone gets a chance to try it.

Jenna Sauber

I saw that there is an option now to insert a You Tube video into an email now, but when I tested it, it didn't appear at all. Is this a glitch being worked on?