With the capabilities that technology grants us today, the creative possibilities for email marketing are virtually endless. Long gone are the days of sending boring, text-only emails. Adding images, GIFs, and/or videos to your email content helps email marketing campaigns capture the attention of your audience, leading to more successful results. In fact, even just having the word “video” in your email subject line can boost open rates by up to 13% and click-through rates by 65%, while also reducing unsubscribes by 26%.

via GIPHY

In a perfect world, you could embed a video right in your emails, as this would enable the actual video playback screen to be present in the body of them. However, most email clients don’t support embedded videos. Therefore, you’re better off linking out to your video. Here’s a little trick that will allow you to link more than just plain text and display a video in your email, thereby increasing your click-through rate.

⚓ Find the original source for the video you’d like to upload. Your video needs to be hosted somewhere online in order for you create a link.

⚓ Take a screenshot of the video screen. Make sure to leave all of the control buttons (pause, volume, etc.) in the image, as this is what people will click to start the video.
Go to your email and insert the image where you want it.

⚓ Link the image to the original source for the video. People will click play and be redirected to the video’s web page.

Now that you realize how simple it is to send emails with ‘embedded’ videos, you may be wondering if it’s worth taking the extra time. Think about it this way- viewers are 64% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video. The only way to know whether or not video is the best method for your company is to test it out.

We’ll leave you with this: Pay attention to the length of the video. If it’s too short, you won’t be able to get your point across; too long and your viewers may lose interest. Try to keep them to around 60-90 seconds.