|
Video emails - are they even possible? |
|
Written by Jack Bremer
|
|
Friday, 27 March 2009 |
 Video is fast becoming the way to showcase your brand, products and company vision on the Internet. Once you've gone to the effort of producing your advert, viral video, screencast or webinar video, you'd like people to actually watch it, right? We're often asked about sending videos in emails, and have based our response on our experience - "don't do it!"
We stumbled across a well written article over at Campaign Monitor, explaining the various ways you could try to embed video in an email - Flash (FLV), Quicktime (MOV), Windows Media (WMV), animated GIF (yay!), Java and MPEG...
They tested the various approached with all the major email clients - from AOL to Apple Mail, from Outlook to iPhone and Gmail to Yahoo! The result was unanimous - animated GIF is the only way to reliably show movement in an email.
At 3B we like to encourage our clients to propagate their message far and wide - that's why our SEO and SEM efforts are so highly regarded, and video is no exception - using the power of TubeMogul, we push our clients' videos to 25 major video sharing sites at once. This encourages huge viewership and community participation - most of those sites allow comments, and this allows clients to monitor their e-reputation - what does Joe Public really think about them? Building a YouTube channel allows you to brand the appearance of your selection of videos, and accelerates the growth of your viewing community through subscription following.
Once your videos are on the web, the best way to promote them by email is always to put a screengrab (much like the one above) in an email and encourage that to be clicked to view the video - TubeMogul will track the number of views, and you could use a URL tracking service like http://tr.im to track the number of clicks generated purely from the email. If you're driving people to your site rather than YouTube or similar, then simple Google Analytics Campaign Tracking will suffice!
If you're new to the video or email marketing game then some of these terms might not make too much sense - don't worry, with us holding your hand you've got a choice - either learn from us, or let us do it all! Easy peesy either way! Now, where's that camcorder?
The Current State of Video in Email [via Campaign Monitor]
» No Comments
There are no comments up to now.
» Post Comment
|
