“How do you embed a video into an email?” I had someone on my staff ask me that the other day. I’m not an expert on these things, so correct me if I’m wrong. I told them “You can’t, but you can trick the reader into thinking a video is embedded.” I explained my strategy for “fake video embedding” and they thought it was clever. I don’t think I came up with it… I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in other places. Then yesterday, I got an email using the very strategy I had just talked about.

Like I said before, I’m not sure it’s possible to embed video in email, but you can embed pictures in web viewed email. You can even make the pictures links to other pages. So, simply set up the video you want played in vimeo or youtube. Take a screenshot of the video, especially if it has that “play” triangle front and center. You want the picture of the video to look really clickable… where it’s screaming, “CLICK ME!” Then insert that picture in your email and link it to the youtube or vimeo page where it is hosted. So, the video isn’t really embedded, but when the email viewer clicks it because they think it is, it quickly takes them to the video page and quickly begins playing. Ideally, we want the video to be embedded, but more importantly we just want them to watch the video. So, this tactic works. Check out the video “fake” embedded in the email I got yesterday.