Sending a video email message

By Jim Kinkade

The next stage of email marketing looks to take advantage of the explosion in video file sharing. The ultimate goal of many marketers is to have their videos play inside the email client, without requiring the recipient to do anything to view. Despite what some companies claim, sending a flash video email that can be read directly in an email client is still not possible in the United States, Europe and most of the industrialized world.

From a delivery standpoint, the size of the email containing an embedded video file is still prohibitive, as the file size of even a video short is substantially greater than that of a large graphic image. Lastly, having a video that is playable in an email would require allowing an ActiveX object and control to run in the email. Most recipient email clients in the United States and Europe block ActiveX objects.

Currently, the best way to send a flash video in an email message is to supply a link to the video posted on a video hosting site. Most video sites provide the link code to copy, which is then pasted in the HTML message body, and a link to the video is prominently displayed when the message is read. Many web-hosting sites allow an image preview of the video to further entice the reader to play the video.

The main benefit of the link is lost, however, if the video is posted on a site like YouTube or Google Video. When a recipient clicking on the link is taken to a page hosted by one of these sites, he or she can be easily distracted from the original video message. Additionally, the benefits of the traffic generated from your video and the websites linking to your video are reaped by those sites rather than your own website.

Fortunately, an affordable video hosting option is now available. The Zeop Media Engine is a downloadable program allows you to set up your own streaming video community, which includes complete control over the videos that appear and the messages surrounding them. Any site traffic generated by your video is assessed to your page ranking, and not an external hosting site. Links to any videos hosted in a community using the Zeop Media Engine can be passed around similar the other sites, but the links point back to you, not them.

If the next step in video emails is indeed allowing the delivered video to play automatically in as many email clients as possible, the method will likely be similar to displaying web images in an HTML email, where the image is served up by the remote host. A video playing in the email would need to follow a similar mechanism, where the video is hosted on a separate site, with the capability to download quickly. Automatic streaming email video sizes may, by necessity, start out rather small, but as technology improves, larger and longer videos will be possible. -- Arial Software

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