If you are running an email marketing campaign, you will find that often plain text is not enough.  Customers pay very little attention to printed words on a page, but if you can incorporate images into your campaign, you will find that you get a much better response. Videos produce better results that simple images.  This article can show you how to use video in email marketing campaigns in a variety of different ways.

Add videos as an attachment

The easiest way to learn how to use video in an email marketing campaign is to send videos as an attachment.  Most email hosts simply have a button at the top of the page that says “add attachment,” or something similar, and this is the easiest way to add a video to an email.  This is the obvious advantage to this method, but there is also a down side to this method.  If you add video in an attachment, you run the risk of your contact deleting the message without downloading the video.

Many viruses are transmitted to computers as attachments in emails and  email marketing campaigns are often sent to contacts that will not immediately recognize your email address.  Anyone interested in protecting their computer’s hard drive would likely not read and delete an unsolicited email and never look back if it had an attachment with it.

Add links to an off-site account

Sites such as www.photbucket.com, www.myspace.com, and www.facebook.com offer free hosting of videos and a unique web address for your uploads, so that you can simply add a link in your email which sends readers to the account.  Also, www.youtube.com hosts free videos by others that can be linked.  This is a great and relatively easy option for those still learning how to use video in email marketing campaigns.  You can choose to make the pages private and include a password, so that only those contacted can view the page, or you can make it public with the intent that you can attract more business when others happen to view your videos.

The downside to this approach is that many readers may not take the time to follow your link.  The average email reader has several windows open at once, and Internet users in general tend to multitask while reading email.  If your message requires too much “work,” you will likely not get much of a response.

Embed Images and videos with HTML

For the advanced Internet user who already understands how to use video in email marketing campaigns, the most effective way to add video to an email message is simply to embed the video into the message itself.  Embedded videos can be programmed to begin automatically as soon as the message is opened, or they can be programmed to wait until readers click a play button, so that text can be added above the video.