How to Use Wistia and Email Like a Pro — WistiaFest 2017

Chad White, Research Director, and Kevin Mandeville, Product Manager, of Litmus spoke about benefits, four key implementations, best practices, and measuring video in email. In recent years, tons of video content has been produced, cost of video content continues to fall, and most marketers are still increasing their video budgets. Video and email helps you grow your list, improve open and click rates, engage your audience, retain subscribers, and show off your brand’s human side.

Before dedicating your budget to video in email, it’s important to know a little about email rendering. Your email doesn’t look the same in every single email client. There are about 15,000 potential renderings among the thousands of email clients like Gmail, Outlook, and more. To help, White and Mandeville go over available support, examples, design strategy, and methods for different ways you can promote video with email.

The first implementaion is a linked static image video with email. It is 100% supported by all email clients even though some may block images by default. Your link will always go to the video you inserted.

The second is animated GIFs video with email. Animated GIFs are not supported in Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, or 2016 for Windows. Animated GIFs are a clever way to direct people toward an action you want them to take in your email. You can engage users longer, provide a strong incentive to click through, and GIFs offer broad support aside from Outlook. However, GIFs don’t always have the smoothest playback, are often time-consuming to make, and tend to be large files.

Animated CSS Sprites are moving images in emails. They optimize load time and performance and offer complete control and customization over your animation. Unfortunately, they’re not well supported yet, and they’re more difficult to implement due to coding knowledge needed.

Lastly, HTML5 video in email plays right inside an email client. For iOS only, it is 42% supported. This implementation provides a native experience for subscribers with smooth playback. However, it’s not well supported, lacks engagement analytics, and is more difficult to implement.

Watch White and Mandeville’s presentation to learn all about best practices for using video and email.