How to Email a Video to Your Customers

So you want to include a video in your next email newsletter. Seems simple enough... but did you know that you can’t actually embed a video into an email? Which begs the question: how do you email a video to your customers?

Luckily, there are several easy workarounds to this problem. We’re here to tell you everything you need to know in order to get your video content in front of your customers via email.

How to Email a Video to Your Customers

Before you can email a video to your customers, you have to host that video content somewhere. A couple of great options for hosting are Vimeo and YouTube. With Vimeo, you can host, manage, and share your videos all in one place with up to 7TB of storage. Vimeo provides multiple package options. You can stick with their free plan, which allows for 500MB per week of upload space. Their paid plans start at $7/month for 5GB per week of upload space.

YouTube is another great option for video hosting. This is an obvious and popular choice since YouTube is free to use and the second largest search engine on the web. Alternatively, social platforms that support video content such as Facebook or LinkedIn can also act as your video host.

Another option for video hosting is to self-host your own videos on a Wordpress website. If you’re interested in learning more about this option, check out this YouTube video. It provides a great walkthrough for self-hosting videos on Wordpress.

Now that we have video hosting covered, let’s get into your three best options for actually emailing your video to your customers.

1. Mailchimp ‘Video Content Block’

Mailchimp is an all-in-one integrated marketing platform and email marketing service. And, when it comes to emailing videos, Mailchimp makes things nice and easy. When you create an email campaign in Mailchimp, you can choose to use their Auto-Convert feature to insert a Video Content Block and input your video's URL. This appears to “embed” your video within the email, but what is really happening is Mailchimp cleverly generates a thumbnail with a play button overlaid. Once the user clicks on the thumbnail, they are redirected to the video itself.

For more information on how to email a video with Mailchimp, check out their guide here.

2. Vaetas

Vaetas is a software company that created a tool called Video Connect. With Video Connect, you can directly connect with and convert prospects by using personalized call-to-action videos. Vaetas gives you the option to share those videos via email, texting, social messaging, or website embeds. They take a unique approach to generating an animated GIF (like the one below) that links to your video. An additional benefit to this service, is that right after the video is done playing the user is redirected to a call-to-action of your choice

You can give Vaetas Video Connect a trial run for 15 days with their free trial (and after that, it’s only $25/month).

3. Create a Linkable Thumbnail

If you use a different email marketing service than the two mentioned above, you will essentially need to do manually what the above services do for you. 

So, in order to email a video to your customers, all you have to do is create an image (preferably a thumbnail or screenshot from your video), embed it in your email, and then add a hyperlink to the image so that it directs anyone who clicks on it to your video on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.).

We recommend overlaying a triangle play button over top of the image thumbnail using a graphic editor like Visme. This simple change can drastically increase your click-through rate, as it implies that clicking on the image will “play” or redirect them to the video.

Do you have a good tip on how to email a video? Share it in the comments!

And if you want to create incredible videos to share (via email, social media, and anywhere else), try Zubtitle! Sign up for a free account today and start creating!