Video is fast becoming the preminate online marketing tool. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth at least a few thousand. These days there is no better way to communicate you message to prospects than with video. If you have a good opt-in email list, using video as a part of your email marketing campaign can grab attention and dramatically improve open rates. But, you need to be clever in how you do it.

 If you directly embed your video code from YouTube, for example, you will run into deliverability problems because spam filters and email programs will remove or disable the video code from the email.

But, all is not lost in sending video by  email. To achieve the same effect, you simply add an image link that looks like your video to your email. It’s like adding a graphic with a hyperlink to a webpage that has the video you would like the email recipient to see. Here are the steps:

1. Take a screen shot of the web page that has the video on it. If you aren’t familiar with screen capture, here’s how to do it:  Using Windows? Hit the "Print Screen" button. Using a Mac? Hold the "Command" and "Shift" buttons and hit "3"
2. Next, paste the screenshot into any graphics programs like Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks or others. If you don’t have one, there is a great free program called GIMP you can download and use.
3. Use the marquee tool to select the area around the video, then crop it to size.
4. You need to upload the image to your website or email marketing program. We use and recommend AWeber for email marketing..
5. Add the image to your email marketing piece and add a hyperlink to the real video on your website. Add some text to let readers know to click video to watch.

Not everyone will have the ability to see images in their email program, so remember to put appropriate ALT text for your image, so that if they have images turned off, they know there’s a video to click to.

Example:

Have You Used This Tactic? At Click for Clients, we’ve used it and seen greatly improved open rates for our email campaigns. Give it a shot. It can work for you too.

Has linking to videos this way worked well for you? Have you learned anything along the way that you think our readers could benefit from when creating their own video emails?

Share your thoughts below!

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