Question · Email & retention
Can you embed a video in a marketing email?
Asked by an online course creator · Answered by Nathan Frater ·
The short answer
Practically, no. Outlook, Hotmail and most of the other common inboxes break it. Link to the video instead, hosted somewhere with no distractions.
You can embed a video in emails to Gmail inboxes sometimes. That’s how niche it is. You don’t control which inbox your customer opens the email in, so I don’t build emails around it.
There are two options I like. The first is Vimeo. Upload the video as unlisted and turn the clutter off: no related videos, no logo, no speed or download controls. The second is a hidden page on your own website, with the video at the top and a single next step underneath.
Either way, there’s nowhere else for them to go except watch that video. Send people to a normal video page and the related videos will happily pull them somewhere else.
This matters most when the video is part of onboarding. If someone has just bought a course, or a product that needs a bit of explaining, you want them to actually watch that first video. Give it a page with no exits.