Video in newsletters

Video is growing fast as a way to carry a message, and good video keeps getting cheaper and easier to produce. It can carry an advertising message, but it works just as well as instructions for your product, as a short demonstration of a new feature, or as a review.

Studies have shown that video in a newsletter can lift the click rate by as much as 65 per cent, and that merely mentioning video in the subject line can lift the open rate by up to 20 per cent. So it is well worth using.

The problem with video in email

It cannot be played inside the mail client. That is not an oversight: it is a security restriction, built to limit the risk of virus and spam attacks.

The usual workaround has been to send the recipient off to YouTube to watch — and with that comes the risk that they never come back to the rest of what you wrote.

How we handle it

Upload the video to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook or one of the 50-odd other video services we support, and add the link to your newsletter.

We pull a still frame from the video automatically and put a play button on it. The link then opens the video in the recipient’s browser and starts playing it straight away.

The recipient is no longer sent away from the content you spent time writing. The video supplements what you wrote, shown in the right context.