Rich Media/Flash in Emails: Not (yet) A Good Choice

What about incorporating rich video or audio content directly in your emails?  New technologies, like CertifiedVideo from Goodmail, allow marketers to send videos and avoid issues with spam filters. More, HTML5 ha arrived with its new <video> tag that was created to provide native video support using a single codec across all browsers without the need for third party plugins like Flash.  These are new interesting developments that we should take into consideration.

To this day, Flash and other rich media are not supported in many email clients. And even with email clients that do support rich media your subscribers may not yet be ready to receive this new technology via email.

That’s why, we suggest  not to embed videos into your HTML emails. A good alternative is to post them on your website and link to them  from your email. If you want to report a video from YouTube or other video sharing sites, just create a screenshot of the video player in action, insert that image into your email, and link it to your actual post/page.

Finally, if you want to add some animation to your emails, use an animated GIF instead.  There are some cool tools what let you easily convert your video into an animated gif, so that the “video” will play in all email clients except Outlook 2007, which only displays the first frame.