Videos in Emails
Videos have never been fully supported in emails. Email design in general is about 5 years behind any web technology so it has always been impossible to use videos that pay itself in the email client.
Explosion of videos in recent years
In recent years, video views have skyrocketed. With higher broadband speeds, availability of cheap cameras and video focused sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Hulu, Videos are taking over as the main content generator for many companies. However even with these technologies Video in emails has still been more of a fantasy rather than a reality.
Workarounds for using Videos on Emails
Currently Marketers were left with no choices for embedding videos on emails. We have advised all our clients in creating a thumbnail with a play button on top of the thumbnail, which when clicked will open the browser and show the video in a new window. The other solution will be to use animated gifs (which again can’t be used by versions of Outlook).
New HTML5 Solution for adding videos on Apple Mail, Entourage and Iphone
With HTML5 now we have a solution for adding embedded videos on Apple Mail, Entourage and Iphone. For all other clients, it will display the fallback image which will open the video when clicked on.
Usage Code
To use the video, please use this code. The code should make sense if you have used HTML in the past. If not please leave a comment below and we can explain it for you.
<video width=”xxx” height=”yyy” poster=”images/videothumbnail.jpg” controls=”controls” autoplay=”autoplay”>
<source src=”http://mysite.com/videoname.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″ />
<a href=”http://youtube.com/”><img src=”images/videothumbnail.jpg” width=”xxx” height=”yyy” /></a>
</video>
Client Support
Currently the video will play embedded in Apple Mail, Entourage 2008+, iPhone and MobileMe and the videothumbnail.jpg image is displayed in all other browsers so you are able to use this without any issues.
Existing Email Templates with Video Embedded
For existing clients, we also have existing templates which have the code already in the template, please reach out to us to add this to your NetMail platform.