Email Marketing and Wistia

Email marketing campaigns are great for engaging your prospects with timely messages. When done right, they can be an excellent driver of business value.

Adding media to the mix is an effective way to increase click-through rates and maximize engagement with your message. Wistia makes it easy to integrate media with your email-marketing campaigns, as well as measure the results down to the individual viewer, second-by-second.

After this tutorial you will be able to integrate media into your email marketing campaigns, and understand which recipients are engaged with your message.

Using Wistia Email Marketing Embeds

Let’s get cranking on creating some awesome email campaigns with video!

Note: we created a specific page for our most popular merge tag option: MailChimp!

By embedding an Email Campaign Link for one of our supported email providers, each recipient on your list will be automatically tagged by email in your Wistia stats when they click the link and watch your video. This is a great way to take contacts already collected in your email lists and have them identified in your Wistia stats.

Select Your Video

First, pick the video from your account you want to embed in an email. You’ll need to embed it on your landing page (if you’re planning to use one) and also create an email embed.

Start by embedding the video on the landing page you’ll be using (if you’re having it point to your Wistia Media Page, you’re all set).

If you are having any trouble, check out our customizing and embedding articles for more.

Next, select Embed & Share.

Select Your Email Marketing Provider

Select the Email Campaign Link tab, in the Embed & Share modal, and choose your provider from the drop-down list. We’ve got a whole list of the best in the biz, like Constant Contact, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Mad Mimi. Check out our integrations page for the full list!

After you choose your email marketing provider, you can customize the settings for your campaign.

Thumbnail Size refers to the size of the thumbnail image in your email. Do you want it to dominate the email? Or should it be playing third fiddle? 450px is our standard width, but you can change it as you see fit.

Links to means where people will end up after clicking the thumbnail image. By default, it’s a public link to the media in your Wistia account. If you want to set up a landing page instead, just change the link here.

Create the Campaign

Once you’ve got your settings dialed in, copy the video merge tag, and paste it into the HTML editor for your email provider. It may show up as just the merge tag - try the preview mode in your email campaign provider to see how it displays. When you are satisfied, send it out to your loving audience!

Voila! The thumbnail image will appear in your email, linked to the page you specified with your video. In the background, we’ll be collecting stats on which viewers in your list viewed the video (available in the Public Stats area of your account).

Custom Dynamic Links in Email Marketing Services

Wistia provides a good smattering of email merge tags right within the app. But if you’d like the construct your own, read on!

Step 1: Upload and embed the media

As mentioned above, the media that you wish people to view needs to be viewable at a publicly accessible web page. To do this, you will need to upload your media to your Wistia account and then embed it on a page on your website.

For instructions on how to do that, see the following help pages:

• How to upload
• How to embed

Step 2: Construct the dynamic link

Wistia attaches views of your media on your website to individual email addresses through the use of a special hyperlink called a dynamic link.

Dynamic links use the mail merge capabilities of your email marketing provider to create a personalized URL for every person in your mailing list.

The dynamic link we make here should be input into your email marketing tool to create the link that your users will click on to view your media. Then we can start tracking!

First, start with the URL of the page where you embedded your media. As an example, let’s say your media was embedded on the following page:

https://wistia.com/library/shooting-video-with-an-iphone

Next, we add a query string parameter to this URL where the user’s email will be passed. The query string parameter to add here is ?wemail=

This gives a resulting URL of:

https://wistia.com/library/shooting-video-with-an-iphone?wemail=

If the URL where your media was embedded already contains a query string, i.e.:

https://wistia.com/library/shooting-video-with-an-iphone?test=true

then simply add an ampersand before the wemail=:

https://wistia.com/library/shooting-video-with-an-iphone?test=true&wemail=

Step 3: Finish and use the dynamic link

The final step to finish the dynamic link is to add the email merge tag from your email marketing tool. A merge tag is a special character that your email marketing client uses to personalize your email for each individual recipient.

It is necessary to find out:

1. Whether your email marketing tool supports dynamic links (i.e. merging user data into URLs)
2. What the URL email merge tag is for your email marketing tool

We have compiled a growing list of email marketing tools, and we’ve created a table what the URL email merge tag is for that tool.

Let’s assume, for an example, that we are using INinbox as our email marketing tool. The URL email merge tag for INinbox is: ##email##

To complete the dynamic link, we simply append this URL email merge tag to the end of the link created in Step #2. The result is:

https://wistia.com/library/shooting-video-with-an-iphone?test=true&wemail=##email##

This is the link that can be used in your email marketing campaign. Your finished link in HTML might look something like the following:

<a href="https://wistia.com/library/shooting-video-with-an-iphone?test=true&wemail=##email##">See our short 30 second video!</a>

The Results

When someone clicks the dynamic link in your email campaign, they will be taken to the page on your site containing the embedded media. Wistia will capture the user’s email address and associate it with that person’s viewing session on your website.

When you view the stats for your media you’ll see analytics for each person who clicked through from your email campaign as shown in the following example:

You can see this data in the Audience page too!

Additionally, this data can also be exported to a spreadsheet using the export to CSV feature on the stats media page, or via Wistia’s Stats API, to help you more easily sort through large data sets.

This true read on individual viewer engagement allows you to know who your most interested viewers are. From there you can score your leads, track future communications with pin-pointed precision, and calculate the ROI of your campaigns.

Email Clients That Support Dynamic Links

The following is a table that includes the email clients we have encountered that support dynamic links, and the merge tags needed to take advantage of them.

Some of them are not included in the product itself–directions for use are given in the previous section.

Email Merge Tags With SendGrid

Thanks to some research from our friend Steven Tell of SpudFlower, here’s how to use dynamic merge tags with SendGrid:

• Add a column into your Recipient List with the unique value (in this case, email address)
• You can use the name of that column as part of the link

So if your recipient list looked like this:

You can now write a link like:

<a href="www.website.com?wemail=[EMAIL_ADDRESS]">

And that would be dynamically replaced to:

<a href="www.website.com?wemail=support@sendgrid.com">

Pretty neat! Thanks also to Jayson at SendGrid support!

Embedding Video in Email

You may not use an email marketing service, and that’s okay! You can still embed your videos in your email. Read on to learn how!

Email Campaign Link

Once you select your video, click “Embed” to open the embedding modal and click into the “Email Campaign” tab. Scroll down to the “Email Provider” option and set it to “None.” Then, set the thumbnail size, and paste the webpage URL where you’d like your thumbnail to link to.

Once done, copy your email merge tag and paste it into the body of your email.

Copy Link and Thumbnail

Copy Link and Thumbnail can be used to paste your video’s thumbnail into your email. It allows you to copy the thumbnail of the video itself (along with the play button), and includes a link back to the video’s media page in Wistia. When a viewer clicks to watch the video, they’ll be taken to view it right in Wistia! In order to copy the link and thumbnail of your video, you’ll want to:

1. Head to your video’s media page in Wistia.
2. Right-click within the video.
3. In the Context Menu that pops up, select Copy link and thumbnail.
4. Paste the code where you would like viewers to see the thumbnail, and you’re all set!

Turnstile and Email Marketing

If you have a Turnstile on your video, you can connect it to a list in your email marketing provider so viewers will be added to the list once they submit the form!

If you have a Turnstile enabled on your video, it will automatically be disabled for viewers who click the Email Campaign Link. This way your viewers don’t need to fill out a form when they’ve already been identified by the link!