Video email marketing is the newest trend and it’s taken the email marketing world by storm.
Marketers are constantly looking for ways to create and edit videos, and then incorporate them into their email marketing strategies and tactics – and honestly, it seems to be working. Actually, a report published by Forrester showed that including a video in an email can lead to a 200-300% CTR (Click-Through-Rate) increase.
Email videos have the ability to hook users upfront and make them engage, be it by checking out your product (more on how to do this, in a tick) or by looking into your brand and offers more thoroughly.
YOU AGREE??
Your lovely corporate video is ready. The next important task is to share it with your customer, potential customers, Channel partners, promoters, influencers and all friends. Email videos through file-sharing or attaching a link is an important step for the outreach. You can embed the video or make a thumbnail/image/GIF of a video inside an email and add a link redirecting to an external site, which could be your landing page, product pages, or your shared YouTube or any other hosting platform, where the full video will run.
Considering there are various email and cloud providers the process might be a little different for Gmail and Google Drive, Outlook and OneDrive, Yahoo, Apple Mail, and more.
Allow us to walk you through different modes to email videos:
- Email Videos Using Gmail – Gmail imposes a message-size limit of 25 MB. If your video is smaller than 25 MB, simply attach the file to your email message. When you want to share a video file larger than 25 MB, save the file to Google Drive and send recipients a link to the file. Your recipients will select the link to view the video.
- Email Videos Using Outlook and OneDrive – Outlook imposes a message size limit of 20 MB. With a business account, the file size limit is 10 MB. When your video is smaller than the file size limit, attach the file to the email message. When sending large video files with Outlook, save the video file to OneDrive and send a link to the file that anyone can view.
- Email Video Using Yahoo Mail – Yahoo Mail limits message sizes to 25 MB. When your video is smaller than 25 MB, attach the file to the email message. To send videos over 25 MB, insert a link to the file using a cloud sharing service.
- Email Video Using Apple Mail – Apple OS X Mail sets a message size limit of 20 MB. When the video is smaller than 20 MB, attach it to the email message. For larger files, use an iCloud account and a service called Mail Drop to upload your file to iCloud, where it will be available for easy pickup by any recipient for 30 days.
- Email Videos from your iPhone – iPhone can record videos in 720p or 1080p HD, which are both far too large to email (about 80 MB or 180 MB per minute). Fortunately, iPhone is smart enough to get the job done. When you email your iPhone video, the video will be compressed to a smaller size for sending out. You can also Email iPhone Videos and Photos to Dr Fone – Phone Manager (iOS). iPhone would compress the video to email, but that might reduce the video quality. Therefore, your friend won’t get the original 720p or 1080p video via email. If you want to email iPhone 720p/1080p HD videos, you can transfer them to your computer first, and then email iPhone videos via the email service on your computer, as the email service will authorize you to send video without compressing the iPhone video. Transferring iPhone videos to a computer is a piece of cake with Dr Fone – Phone Manager (iOS). This software is a multifunctional phone manager, and it allows you to manage your iOS or Android devices without any effort.
- JumboMail is a great tool for those wondering how to send large files via email attachment without having to sign up for another email address. You can send an email from the main JumboMail website using their existing email without signing up for an account. Email attachments can be as big as 2GB, which should be good, though you can also sign up for a $12 monthly membership to increase the limit to 20GB. WeTransfer and SecurelySend are both similar services that work in the same way as JumboMail and also offer 2GB uploads for free users.
- The cloud factor. While most people would understand the use of OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox, a few more alternative cloud storage platforms are worth a look that can often provide better value. Degoo is one good alternative worth looking at. It may not offer the same level of operating system integration as OneDrive and Google Drive do with Windows and Android respectively, it does provide significantly more storage and upload extent. Degoo offers an impressive 100GB of free storage space with no limit on individual file size and protects all file uploads and downloads with end-to-end encryption. Those who need more storage can upgrade to a $3 a month plan for 500GB or $9 a month for a whopping 10TB. (https://degoo.com/)
Process
The process for how to share large video files via a cloud service is almost identical regardless of what platform you decide to use. Essentially, you need to upload your files to a folder in your cloud account and then share the link to that file or folder in an email or direct message with your contact. There are different cloud services to choose from but most prefer OneDrive for its Windows and Office 365 integration, Google Drive for its Android and Google support, and Dropbox for its streamlined approach across operating systems and ease of use.
You may want to use two or more cloud storage accounts to take advantage of their free storage plans or to use one for work, one for personal use, and another for friends and family.
Dropbox offers 2GB of storage for free, OneDrive offers 5GB, and Google Drive provides free users with 15GB. (https://www.dropbox.com/basic)
Easy Method to Compress Files and Email Videos
ZIP files are one of the oldest ways to reduce the size of files before transferring them between devices or sending them in an email. Creating a ZIP file and adding a file to it, often referred to as zipping, is supported in Windows, Mac OS, and Android operating systems. The downside of ZIP files is that their file size reduction is relatively small so this won’t be a solution if you’re stuck wondering how to send a 10GB video via email and have it meet the 25MB size limit. It can be worth trying if you’re just a few MB over though.
And Voila!
After you have successfully attached the video or the video link to the email, the final tip. You can add alternative text to your videos (and images). It appears in place of the video (or image) when it doesn’t load. Write a simple sentence describing what the video is. You can adjust the play button’s shape or colour to fits the overall design of your email template. There are also other customization options you can tweak, for example, width, padding, and alignment.
The above tips will help you send a more engaging newsletter along with the amazing video. You’ll see the engagement rates going up in no time!
