I was reading this fantastic post over at email-marketing-reports.com, about using video in email marketing. I was under the impression that email marketing is not really ready for embedded video, and the post corroborates what I thought, but the post reminded me that there are other ways to get video into emails, and very good reasons for doing it.

The easiest way to put a video into an email is to grab a screen shot of the video and then simply throw the image into the HTML of the email with a link, so that users can click on it and go to a page outside the email client that will display the video. One thing that I didn’t realize is what a drastic improvement to clickthrough rates that adding the screen shots will create. It doesn’t help your open rate, so if that’s your problem, you gotta get recipients to open the emails first, but once you do that, throwing a few links to videos sounds like a fantastic idea to boost clickthrough rates.

Of course, you don’t want users to simply click on the video link and then not buy/convert, so the video page will need to close the deal, if that’s your goal. Many email marketers apparently see the primary purpose of videos in email as brand awareness. Personally, unless your videos can stand on their own because they are compelling, funny, or entertaining (like www.willitblend.com), I don’t think brand awareness is necessarily the best use of video in email. We all get too many emails as it is, and viewing some cheesy branding video with the charm of a Dharma Initiative training video, is not going to earn you any brand loyalty. But who knows, email marketing tactics are still being developed and we are all learning, so do some A/B split testing and post your results in the comments.