Sending media releases with embedded video files can be tricky due to email client restraints. Check out this post for more information and some workarounds.

Embedding videos in your media releases

The HTML media release builder in Connect gives you tools to easily embed videos in your media releases. You just need to click the “embed media” button:

Then, you just need to paste in the embed code from YouTube or Vimeo.

If you’re not sure how to get the embed code for your video, YouTube has some advice here and Vimeo has some advice here.

Why aren’t my embedded videos working?

Even though Connect gives you the tools to embed videos in your media releases, these videos might not always work when your recipients receive your media releases. This is because the email client that your recipients use might have issues with video content in emails. An email client is a computer program used to access and manage a user’s email – popular email clients include Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail.

All email clients have their own individual requirements around receiving emails with embedded videos. Security issues with third-party plug-ins, like Quicktime and Flash, will likely prevent emails with embedded videos from reaching the recipients’ inbox. If the email is successfully delivered recipients often have issues with playback, resulting in a disappointing user experience. Campaign Monitor did some research here and they discovered that the only email client that can reliably be used to receive embedded videos in Apple Mail.

So that means that even though you can use to Connect to embed video content into a media release, your recipients most likely won’t be able to see the video.

Are there workarounds for adding video content to media releases?

We get it. Video content is really engaging and you’d like to include it in your media release. Here are some workarounds you can try:

• Hyperlinking an image of your video content
• Adding a moving gif to your media release

Hyperlinking an image of your video content

The email client issues discussed above mean that it’s best to hyperlink to video content in your media release.

To make these hyperlinked media releases as visually interesting as possible, you can embed a screen grab of the video as an image in the body of your release.

Embedding an image

Just take a screen grab of your video playing and then embed this image into your media release. Your image will need to be hosted online and then you can embed the image URL, using the Image icon in your Connect release builder. If your organisation doesn’t have a way of hosting images online  you can use a free image hosting service like Flickr or Photobucket.

And then paste your image url into the URL field:

Hyperlinking the image

You can then click into the “Link” tab to hyperlink the image itself – so that if any recipients click on the image in the media release, they’ll be taken through to their browser to watch the video.

You can also add some text after your screen grab, encouraging users to click through to watch your video.

Just highlight the text you’d like to hyperlink, and then click the hyperlink icon:

Then paste in the link to where users can watch the video – like the YouTube or Vimeo link:

Then, users will be able to see an image of the video in the media release they receive – they can click on either the hyperlinked image or the hyperlinked text to watch the video in their browser.

Adding GIFs to media releases

If you’re absolutely sold on adding moving images to your media release, you might want to try adding a moving or animated GIF. This post from Litmus has some cool tips for using GIFs in email campaigns.

Animated GIFs don’t work everywhere, but most email clients do support them. Animated GIFs work in all webmail clients and most desktop and mobile clients. The main exceptions are newer versions of Microsoft Outlook (2007+), which refuses to animate the GIF and instead displays the first frame of the animation. The same goes for Windows Phone 7.

When you’ve got the GIF you want to use, you can insert this into your media release the same you would any other type of picture. If your GIF is already hosted on a GIF source site like Giphy or GIF Bin you’ll be able to grab the image url straight from the site, and then embed this into your media release using the embed image button:

If your organisation doesn’t have a way of hosting gifs online can use a free image hosting service like Flickr or Photobucket  to host the file, and then copy and paste the image url provided into your release.

Remember, if you want to check out how your media release is looking you can use the Send test email button: