How to Embed a Video in an Email

Learning how to perform a new marketing task by trial and error has resulted in satisfaction quite often for me over the years. But there have also been times when I've been left disappointed, frustrated and even a little hopeless.

Such was the case very recently when I tried to embed a YouTube video in the body of an email. I use a great email marketing vendor called Emma at my job. It’s very simple to use and is the complete package – from design to analytics. Composing your email message with Emma is a lot like writing a new post on your blog.

I recently learned the hard way that you can’t simply copy and paste YouTube HTML code into the body of an email like you can for a blog post. I double-checked with Emma’s competitors and yep, they can’t do it either. There may be a way to get around this problem but as I've stated many times, I’m no guru. It could be that this restriction is limited to email marketing vendors but my research helped me realize that for analytical reasons, embedding video code into an email doesn't come highly suggested. Plus, there’s something about the code that doesn't agree with the email software – a guru could probably be more specific here.

So what did I do? I really wanted the recipients of my emails to view this video in a convenient way. I thought back to all the emails I receive on a daily basis that feature video players right there in the body of the email. It dawned on me that those video players aren't video players at all. They’re images of videos that are linked to a video page. In the back of my mind, I knew how this process worked. But it’s like my mind’s eye “sees” the video within the email.

The solution to my problem required the purchase of a video player graphic template from a site like ShutterStock and inserting a photo along with a “Play” icon. Now that I have this image, I can place it into the body of my email and Emma’s software allows me to link it to any page I desire.

An example of a video player image. 

I hope this post has helped you. Isn't it uncanny how solutions to problems that seem unsolvable often turn out to be so simple? I’d love to read about your similar “problems” in the comment section!