Articles

Improve email stats and conversions with HTML5 video

Massimo Arrigoni
9 July 2013
4 min read

Video content can improve conversions and not only where you would simply expect it to be. Web site home pages, marketing campaign landing pages, product pages in ecommerce stores, … you name it. But how about video in email?

Video helps conversions

There is plenty of evidence from research and many examples that show that video can indeed increase conversions. Have a look at these areticles for instance:

How about email?

Until recently, the consensus was that including video content in an email message was not a best practice. It just didn’t work well enough to be worth the effort, and could actually lead to a lousy user experience for the recipient. The recommendation was to simply put an image with a play icon into the email to indicate to the reader that the content was actually a video.

But… things move fast in this industry. So we decided to do some in-depth research and see where we are at with video in email.

  • Practically speaking, what’s the best way to add video to an email?
  • Which email clients can play a video right in the inbox?
  • And what happens exactly when they don’t?
  • In the end… can your marketing department use video in an email today or not?

HTML5 is the way to go for video in email

The first result of our research was to define the HTML code to use in an email message. It’s now clear that HTML5 provides a feasible solution to adding email to an email. Specifically, it offers a way to present code to email clients (and Web browsers… since the message could be viewed with a browser) that allows them to pick the format they like best. The video – in other words – is presented in a few different flavors in other to resolve compatibility issues.

And for those stubburn email clients that want to have nothing to do with playing a video, the code provides a nice fall back: an image, linked to another resource (e.g. a YouTube page, or the Web version of the email itself).

There are several resources on the Internet that can help you encode the
video in the different formats that you will need (e.g. ), and create the HTML5 code to insert in your email.

Email clients’ support for video

We then created a simple email that uses the HTML5 video code mentioned above and tested it with lots of email clients to see exactly when the video played right in the inbox, when it did not, and what happened when it did not.

Here is a screen shot of the message we used.

We kept track of all the results of the test, and created a matrix that show
video support in many different email clients.

Considering which email clients are capable of playing the video right in the
inbox (e.g. iCloud Mail, Outlook.com, Apple Email Client on iPhone, iPad, etc.)
and the percentage of recipients using those tools/devices, we concluded that –
for many senders – a good 30% of recipients will be able to play the video right
in their inbox.


The verdict: green light for video in email

In the end, our verdict is that – when done right – video can be successfully used in email.
It will play right in the inbox for probably 30% of your recipients, and it will
nicely fall-back to a clickable image when it does not.

It could certainly help increase the return on your email campaigns.

We hope you find the research useful and we look forward to your feedback in the comments!

Massimo Arrigoni

Massimo Arrigoni is a software entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in ecommerce and digital marketing. He's currently helping Italy-based MailUp expand internationally from their new San Francisco office. MailUp is a complete email delivery solution for businesses: the #1 ESP in Italy and growing fast around the world. Read this full MailUp review to learn more about the platform.
Before joining MailUp, Massimo was a co-founder, co-owner and former CEO of Early Impact, a California-based e-commerce software. Massimo is also a board member at the Mind The Bridge foundation, a San Francisco-based startup accellerator with a focus on Southern European startups.

16 comments

  • We at Triggered Messaging find – like a lot of other marketers – that highly-personalised emails are the way to go, e.g. showing each subscriber the type of products that they have just been looking at.

    It’s easy enough to personalise text-based emails, but I don’t see how you could personalise video except at huge cost.

    To start with the basics, can you do real-time mail-merge into video and, if so, what type of content can be merged?

    Reply

    • Hi Pete, that would be hard. However, what would be a lot less hard would be to have different blocks of HTML inserted depending on who the recipients is.

      In MailUp, for example, we call this “dynamic content”. You create different blocks of HTML, set up some filters, and then a certain block of HTML is inserted at send time if the filter is a match.

      A simple example would be a different video is shown depending on whether the recipient is a male or a female (of course, this assumes that you have a custom field where you saved the gender).

      Another example could be a skiing vacation message that includes a video of a skiing resort that’s close to you, based on the State that you live in.

      The HTML5 video code is very simple and creating different “blocks” of it is quick to do. The more time consuming part is to definitely to prepare the various videos 🙂

      I hope this helps!

      massimo
      The MailUp Team

      Reply

      • For me, this starts to get interesting if you can combine several such sections in one email, so it’s properly personalized. For example. a browse abandonment email could contain a single video with an intro depending on the type of your family, followed by several 5 second clips edited together – one from each of the holidays that interested you recently. We already do this sort of thing with text, of course, but it would be great to do it with video clips. Any suggestions for the best tool is to automate the editing/personalisation in real-time?

        Reply

          • idomoo is too expensive. Here’s my reply to them, so my speculation about an appropriate architecture goes into the public domain.

            This is 10x – 100x too expensive. We charge about $10K-$25K to handle
            email remarketing (abandonment recovery and analytics) for a typical sma
            customer for an entire year, so clearly paying the same for what I
            understand to be the mastering costs of a video is out of the question.
            Also 2 seconds is too long – I expected streaming of the first video
            segment would start immediately from the nearest node in our content
            delivery network, switching the source for each subsequent segment as
            necessary.

            But thank you for your quick reply.

          • Idomoo is far too expensive. Placing my reply to them into the public domain

            This is 10x – 100x too expensive. We charge about $10K-$25K to handle
            email remarketing (abandonment recovery and analytics) for a typical sma
            customer for an entire year, so clearly [price removed for commercial reasons] for what I
            understand to be the mastering costs of a video is out of the question.
            Also [start time removed for commercial reasons] seconds is too long – I expected streaming of the first video
            segment would start immediately from the nearest node in our content
            delivery network, switching the source for each subsequent segment as
            necessary.

            But thank you for your quick reply.

  • […] GIFs can even be used to make it appear as though you have a video embedded in your creative, something which has previously been made impossible due the stringent SPAM filters most email clients enlist. Indeed, GIF files are one of the only ways to insert moving images into an email creative given that a lot of email clients still offer poor video support. (although some have already given the green light to video in email). […]

    Reply

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