Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

Embedding Video In Email – Overview

With over 15B emails being viewed online each month in the US alone, we’re seeing an uptick in customers asking about embedding video in email.  This led us to head off and investigate a few different questions:

• Can video be embedded in email?
• If Video can be embedded – how exactly do you do it?
• How / when to use video in email – will your recipients care?
• The future of Video in email

We’ll cover each of these in a series of posts.

Can Video be Embedded in Email?

There are a handful of possible ways to embed video with an email – here’s a quick rundown of the possibilities:

• Flash.  Flash can be embedded in a web page by using an OBJECT tag with an EMBED tag placed inside, to embed a Javascript that will detect if Flash is installed. But… Email doesn’t support Javascript.  Bummer – that means there’s no way to detect if Flash is installed.
• Quicktime.  In web design, Quicktime is typically inserted in a web page the same way as Flash is – using the OBJECT and EMBED tags to embed a Javascript snippet.  Strike-out for Quicktime.
• Windows Media. Again – embedding Windows Media in a web page relies on using a OBJECT tag to embed the media file.  Struck out again.
• Embedded MPEG. Turns out that there is a tricky way to embed MPEG video, but the solution is complicated and can only display if the recipient is using web-based mail and displaying in Internet Explorer version 7, (version 8 no longer works).  Keep in mind that you’re now sending a huge emails – since the video file will be embedded and delivered to each recipient. 
  Given these restrictions, support is not really practical.  However, for the techno-curious among us – here’ a blog post by Anna Yeaman that describes the trick:  http://stylecampaign.com/blog/?cat=3&paged=5
• Animated GIF. Aahh. An animated GIF should look just like a GIF image, right?  Well Outlook 2007 explicitly does not support embedded animated GIFs (Outlook only displays the first frame of an animated GIF – thanks Microsoft…)  For other email clients that do support animated GIFs – there are still some tricky considerations.  In a nutshell:
  • Animated GIF’s don’t include sound.Animated GIF emails are not mobile friendly.
  • Animated GIFs are still subject to image blocking; their large file size will greatly increase the likelihood of being blocked altogether
  • Potentially high CPU load when playing back animated GIFs.
  • No user control – the animated GIF plays on opening

If you want to cut to the chase and know how the heck to get video in your email – here’s our “How to Embed Video in Email’ posting.

Otherwise, here are our findings — we pulled together the table below that summarizes video support in a range of email clients:

Support for Video in Various Email Clients