As the benefits of video content become clear to web publishers the challenge has switched to driving views of this content, cost effectively. Email is the channel of choice of many video content producers as it ticks the cost effective box but equally facilitates targeting, scheduling and personalization, which all help contribute to a better result.

Embedding video into your email template

Historically the most popular email approach to driving views of videos used static images of frames within the video with a play button as a prompt to click through to view the video, this approach then evolved to feature animated gifs. Both these approaches achieve moderate success, but they fail to capture the essence of what video is really about, which of course is moving image. Here at Playable we are focused on delivering native video within the email on opening, to fully exploit the medium and the investment made in the content.

So how do we exploit the power of video within email?

Here at Playable we are focussed on delivering the best user experience for all viewers of the video within email that’s why we advocate limiting your video content within the email to a 10 second clip. This clip, which can easily be created with our inbuilt video editor, should be designed to entice the viewer to click through to the full version of the hosted video on your preferred platform, be it YouTube, Wistia, Brightcove or Vidyard.

Over the last decade email marketers have steered away from streaming video content within emails as they couldn’t guarantee an acceptable viewing experience for the majority of their subscribers, as video was being blocked by many of the major browsers and connection speeds could be patchy. This situation has changed over the last couple of years with the advent of HTML which has enabled us to now consistently reach 95% of recipients with video within their email without a hitch. The 5% exception being Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016 for Windows users, who receive the fallback static image.

Those at the forefront of email marketing who have tested native video content within their email campaigns are reporting click through rates up to 150% above those where screen shots of the video, with Play button prompts, where used. Plus the engagement of responders post click is throwing up some astonishing results, with time on site for responders to the video clips reaching 10 x that of responders to static content, and even higher when streaming a live video within the email, which is working particularly well for our sports broadcast clients.

Sending video emails

Having invested the time and resource with a preferred email service provider you’ll want to send your video emails via your current sender, be assured that it will not impact your delivery rates and that it is an easy procedure to include the native video within your email campaign. The Playable video email platform has been designed to work with all the popular ESP’s and requires no tech know how. Within 5 minutes you will have edited your video clip, sized it so it fits the allocated spot in your template, added captions branding or logos as required and received the single line of HTML, generated by Playable, to simply copy and paste into your email template.

Send yourself a sample video email campaign to see first hand what we are delivering here at Playable. [et_bloom_inline optin_id=”optin_56″]