Contents |
| Adding a video thumbnail |
| » Want your video to play within Gmail? |
Summary
EasyEditor allows you to easily add video thumbnails to your campaign.
Contacts clicking on the thumbnail will open up the video in its hosted location in a new browser window (see Information below for more on this).
This thumbnail link is also a tracked link.
Information
The video building block is a link to a video, not an embedded video in the email. This means that when the email recipient clicks on the play button (or anywhere on the video thumbnail), it will launch the video in a browser (or in a video app, if they're using a mobile device).
There are only a handful of mobile devices that will play video inside the email itself. We decided we wanted to design this in a way that works for everyone regardless of their device, rather than just target those platforms and devices and provide a feature that only worked for a limited few.
To add a video thumbnail:
- Drag and drop the Video building block into the desired position in your campaign and then click on the block
- In the 'Settings' panel, enter the video's URL
If you've entered a YouTube URL, the video's default thumbnail will appear in the side panel - and within the campaign.
Click Change image if you want to use a different thumbnail image, or if you've added a link from somewhere other than YouTube. The image manager will open to allow you to choose an alternative image.
A play bar graphic is also included underneath video thumbnails by default, indicating to recipients that the thumbnail is for a video and should be clicked to play. If you don't want to display a play bar, untick Show play bar.
Want your video to play within Gmail?
It may be that you'd prefer your video link to open up in your contacts' Gmail accounts (or similar). If so, you'll need to include the raw link in the text of your email instead (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8myYyMg1fFE).
While this means the preview is rendered nicely in your contacts' inbox, you won't however get any reporting on whether or not your contacts watched the video (because it won't go through our link tracking service).
Best of both worlds?
If you're happy with a compromise, then you could:
- Include a video thumbnail (tracked) in your campaign
- At the bottom of the email, include the raw link to the video in smaller text (but not so small that it looks like you're a spammer trying to hide text)
By doing it this way, the most prominent link will be the tracked thumbnail link for non-Gmail users, whilst for those who like to get the preview straight in the inbox, it will be there (but untracked).
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