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How to add a video to your campaign

This article provides instructions on adding a video to your campaign and what to expect when doing so. 

Video gives your campaign a bit of extra polish and can greatly increase your audience engagement. Featuring a video is helpful for demonstrating a new product, giving a tour of your new office space, showing the highlights of your latest event, and so much more.

Email servers aren't as fond of video as we are, though, and many servers out there tend to block videos that have been embedded in the content of the mailing itself. In addition to the dip in overall delivery rates because of this, embedding video in your email makes it darn near impossible to track who's watched it - which is why we created a video block in our drag and drop editor.

So, while you can't embed a video into your email campaign, you can use our video block feature to link to any YouTube or Vimeo video in a similar fashion. We'll first tell you how to do that, then further down, you'll also find instructions for linking other types of video files to your campaign.  
 

How to add a video block to your mailing

You can find the video block in the drag and drop editor to the left of your mailing when you are in edit mode or creating a new campaign. Besides creating a nice visual presentation of your video, one of the advantages of using the video block is that you'll be able to track who clicked to watch your video in the response summary for that mailing. The video block looks like this in the drag and drop editor:


To add the video block to your campaign, simply drag it from the editor over to one of the yellow drop zones in your mailing, indicating where you'd like it to appear, and drop it in place. The block will immediately open, and you'll need to add a URL for the YouTube or Vimeo video that you would like to feature. The URL link you use should be a direct link to a YouTube or Vimeo video, with nothing added or shortened. On both of these sites, hosted videos always include an option for sharing where you can copy the URL from. 

Just like adding an image, there is also an option to add alternate text, which is what visually impaired people will read instead of seeing the video and is also what will display if images are turned off in a recipient's inbox, so you'll just want to put a brief description of what the video is in the alternate text filed.

After adding the URL, an image of the video will be generated with a play button placed on top of the image, this is generally referred to as a still image or a thumbnail. Click the Insert Video button at the bottom of the popup to place it into your campaign. 

How to add other video links to your campaign 

You can still include video links to videos that aren't hosted on YouTube or Vimeo in your mailings, but you won't use the video block to do so. Instead, you would need to upload the video file to your document library and then link to it in your mailing.  

The document library accepts the following video file types:

  • .mpeg
  • .mp3
  • .mov
  • .flv
  • .avi
  • .asf

Important notes about videos in Frankie mailings

  • The thumbnail that is featured in the video block is generated from the information that YouTube and Vimeo send and unfortunately, there isn't a way to determine what that thumbnail should be without logging into the YouTube or Vimeo account and selecting a different image from there. However, if you'd like to use something different, you can add an image of your video the old-fashion way, by playing the video and taking a screenshot of the still image you'd like to display and then link that image to the video's URL.  
     
  • Although any video that you add using the video block will appear with a play button on an image, the video will not play in the actual email. Instead, clicking the play button will link the recipient to the YouTube or Vimeo URL. This is because trying to embed a video can make the email too heavy, and some servers will block these types of files from coming through, which can negatively affect your delivery rate, and we never want that to happen. 
     
  • Are you getting an error that the video thumbnail can't be generated? Try clearing your browser's cache and cookies, shutting down the browser and restarting it. 
     
  • It's always a good practice to check your response summary after you've sent out a new campaign, so you can think about the most appropriate way to follow up with your video viewers. You might create a new audience segment for those who clicked to view the video and share more video content with those folks in the future.