Compatibility and User Experience
Posted: Thu Dec 12, 2024 6:55 am
The new APNG and WEBP formats enable 90% of users to enjoy a multimedia experience in Viewed video emails. We’ve talked about the persuasive power of video in your email marketing campaigns on several occasions. But the truth is that adding video to your emails is no easy task, unless it’s done with the help of an automated video email solution like Viewed.
1. Including a video in an email is not trivial
The difficulty lies in the fact that each device, email client, browser or operating system is able to interpret or play specific video or multimedia files, while others do not. This makes playing videos in your emails non-trivial. In fact, if we only include an HTML5 video tag in our email template, what will happen is that about 7% of your recipients will see the video , but the rest will either see nothing or receive an error message saying “file could not be loaded”.
There is also the issue of servers. Most email service providers (ESPs) or email sending platforms do not allow including a multimedia file within the email because they do not want to carry the data traffic mexico telegram data that this entails, they fear saturation of their systems and they do not want to assume any additional costs. Some allow a maximum of a 2 MB file, but that will only serve to include a file in GIF format with a very low quality.
1.1. Homemade solutions to include videos in your email marketing campaigns
There are many articles on the Internet that talk about the difficulties of including a video in an email, in fact, most advise against it because they do not know how to overcome the technical problems it generates. In the absence of knowledge, they propose "homemade" solutions , from which you must choose one. These solutions can be summarized as follows:
Include a frame from the video with a link to YouTube or another video platform.
Create a GIF from the video and include it in the email.
In the first option, the simplest of all, YouTube or another video platform is expected to bear the data traffic generated by the videos. This is not bad, but it is a solution that still delivers a static email and only achieves 16% of playback compared to opened emails, which is far from the 85% of playback achieved with Viewed technology. In addition, once the user is on YouTube, their traceability is lost and they may get lost in viewing competitor videos or others, thus losing all the effectiveness of the campaign. No views or conversions are achieved. Only a small increase in clicks.
The second option may seem very tempting, since a GIF looks a lot like a video, so why not try it? There are several platforms that create a GIF from a video, but none of them take into account that this GIF will be played in an email and the limitations or problems that may appear. In fact, the GIF format is a sequence of animated images, so the weight of the GIF will be very similar to the weight of the sum of the images it contains.
1. Including a video in an email is not trivial
The difficulty lies in the fact that each device, email client, browser or operating system is able to interpret or play specific video or multimedia files, while others do not. This makes playing videos in your emails non-trivial. In fact, if we only include an HTML5 video tag in our email template, what will happen is that about 7% of your recipients will see the video , but the rest will either see nothing or receive an error message saying “file could not be loaded”.
There is also the issue of servers. Most email service providers (ESPs) or email sending platforms do not allow including a multimedia file within the email because they do not want to carry the data traffic mexico telegram data that this entails, they fear saturation of their systems and they do not want to assume any additional costs. Some allow a maximum of a 2 MB file, but that will only serve to include a file in GIF format with a very low quality.
1.1. Homemade solutions to include videos in your email marketing campaigns
There are many articles on the Internet that talk about the difficulties of including a video in an email, in fact, most advise against it because they do not know how to overcome the technical problems it generates. In the absence of knowledge, they propose "homemade" solutions , from which you must choose one. These solutions can be summarized as follows:
Include a frame from the video with a link to YouTube or another video platform.
Create a GIF from the video and include it in the email.
In the first option, the simplest of all, YouTube or another video platform is expected to bear the data traffic generated by the videos. This is not bad, but it is a solution that still delivers a static email and only achieves 16% of playback compared to opened emails, which is far from the 85% of playback achieved with Viewed technology. In addition, once the user is on YouTube, their traceability is lost and they may get lost in viewing competitor videos or others, thus losing all the effectiveness of the campaign. No views or conversions are achieved. Only a small increase in clicks.
The second option may seem very tempting, since a GIF looks a lot like a video, so why not try it? There are several platforms that create a GIF from a video, but none of them take into account that this GIF will be played in an email and the limitations or problems that may appear. In fact, the GIF format is a sequence of animated images, so the weight of the GIF will be very similar to the weight of the sum of the images it contains.