3 simple ways to send video in email

Whether it’s for an email newsletter, 1:1 prospecting, a sales email, customer support or just send a video in email to your mum, getting your video embedded properly into your email can be frustrating.

In this article, I’m sharing my favourite three ways to get your video seamlessly embedded into the body of your email so that the recipient simply has to click ‘play’. You can’t just attach a video directly to an email and make it play, so there are a number of workaround tricks that make the whole process seamless for your email recipient.

First of all, what you DON’T want to do is try to add the video as an attachment. Unless it’s a super small file (under 10mb) then it will be rejected or bounce back. Maintain the quality of your video. Don’t try to compress it so it’s small enough to email as an attachment.

Sure you can just include a link to the video in the text, but that’s not very engaging, and as someone skims an email they are likely to miss it entirely. If you want to ensure your video gets noticed in the email and actually played, then you’ll want to step it up a notch or two and I’m going to break it down to 3 easy ways (although there are many other ways to do this depending on your email platform).

Screenshot from YouTube and hyperlink

Upload the video onto any video platform, such as YouTube. It can be a public video or set to unlisted.
Select your video thumbnail or upload a custom thumbnail.
Next, screenshot the thumbnail with the play button overlay visible. My preferred way to do this on YouTube is to click on the share button, then select ‘Embed’, which displays the clean thumbnail with the play button overlay visible and it’s easy to simply screen shot from there.
Hit shift + command + 4 on a mac OR windows key + shift + S on a PC.
In the body of the email, place the thumbnail image, resize it as needed and create a hyperlink from that image to where is the video is hosted.

A good tip is to add a text hyperlink underneath the thumbnail, to make it clear that there is a link and avoid any issues with blocked images etc.

Giphy capture and hyperlink (windows RecordIt)

Much like the first approach this next one steps it up a notch to make your video thumbnails so much more enticing and clickable. After all, if you send a video in an email and it never gets clicked or watched, what’s the point?

Once again your video needs to be uploaded to a video platform. For this example let’s use YouTube again.
Instead of taking a static screen shot, we’ll be capturing a short section of the video as an animated gif.
Use Giphy capture app on Mac or RecordIt for Windows
Find an engaging 3-6 second section. Cue it up and capture it using the app.
Trim as needed. Tweak the settings. Export the gif.
Embed the gif into your email body as before and hyperlink out to the video platform

Vidyard

This last technique really steps it up a notch using a third party video tool to handle the video embed, linking and playback which allows some valuable additional features such as click tracking and video engagement analytics.

My go-to tool for this is the free Vidyard screen recorder or extension.
Either record directly through the plugin OR upload the video you want to send to your library.
Click ‘share’ and I usually select ‘share thumbnail and link’
Paste this into your email body and you’re all set.

When a recipient clicks on the animated thumbnail or the link they’ll go directly to the video on your Vidyard player page.

Note that you can do this for an unlimited amount of videos on the Vidyard free plan, but for a small upgrade cost you can get deeper insights and analytics into who watched the videos, and for how long, more customisation of your player page and so on.

So try out these tools to make sending videos via email easy peasy!

Final Tip: Include the word “[Video]” in your subject line to get a better open rate.

3 simple ways to send video in email

Whether it’s for an email newsletter, 1:1 prospecting, a sales email, customer support or just send a video in email to your mum, getting your video embedded properly into your email can be frustrating.

Screenshot from YouTube and hyperlink

Giphy capture and hyperlink (windows RecordIt)

Vidyard

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