Video within email is finally becoming a reality
The holy grail of email marketing is finally becoming a reality, and the geniuses at Gmail are the proverbial Indiana Jones’ who’ve discovered it. As far as I know, Gmail is the first browser-based email client to allow videos to display within their emails. In order to turn this feature on, enable YouTube previews under “Settings” > “Labs”.
Yes, yes, I know this was blogged about everywhere last week, but I haven’t had the chance to test it myself until today. And I don’t mean to sound exaggerated, but this has the potential to be pretty ground-breaking in the world of email marketing if you think about it.
If you’re an email marketer you have to turn off click-tracking within your ESP in order for the video to work. The video will only display if the YouTube URL is in your HTML… not the unique URL your ESP creates in its place for click-tracking purposes.
I only have one other criticism with this: The video displays separated from the email—below it. You have to “unhide” the video for it to actually play. See below:
This is all well and good right now… But once they allow emails to include EMBEDDED YouTube video, then that my friends, will be Gmail’s overarching killer app.
With all things considered, I can’t wait until I get the opportunity to segment all of my Gmail users and send them an email with a YouTube video. I suggest first sending out an email asking your Gmail subscribers if they’d like to receive videos in their emails. Provide them with the simple directions on how to enable the videos in their account. A week later, start sending them videos relevant to their interests. I’m guessing your response rate will spike significantly.
If anyone has incorporated a video into any of their email campaigns, comment below. I’d love to hear about the results!
Posted by MindComet on Mar. 27, 2009
Once this is fully implemented across most common email apps, I can see open rates (or render rates) from trusted sources who consistently use it see a nice, healthy, permanent jump. <BR><BR>However, I think it’ll be quite a while (if ever) before we’ll see that in Outlook, the elephant in the room.<BR><BR>I bet it’ll see the most initial success with brands that cater to those who are most likely to use gmail, “nerds”
. So techie brands might see the most initial benefit and hopefully others will learn from them!
Posted by Art Wilbur on 04/01/2009 10:28 AM