Can’t video and email just get along?

We get a lot of questions about embedding video in emails. Typically they go something like, “Hey, can I embed video in my email?” People tend to get right to the point around here.

Anyway, we’ve found that attaching or embedding video tends to be a red flag for server and spam filters, and a lot of email clients don’t render or play video in the way you’d hope. Instead, we suggest hosting the video on your site, on YouTube or, if you’re an Emma customer, in your document library. Then you can include the link to the video’s online location in your email.

To show you what we mean, here’s an example from a fabulous email newsletter we got this week. It’s from the folks at Opportunity Green, which is a sustainability conference happening in L.A. this Saturday (we’ll be there, by the way, and if you’re in the area, you should come, too). They feature a couple of YouTube videos in their campaign, but they didn’t just opt for simple text link. Instead, they took a screenshot of the opening frame, player and all, included it in their campaign as a jpeg and linked the jpeg to their video on YouTube. We thought it was a great way to give a campaign a video-ish touch without affecting its delivery.

Update: We’re sorry to say that images in the Opportunity Green email are no longer available.

[tags]email marketing, email newsletters, sustainability, opportunity green, myemma.com[/tags]