How to add Vidyard videos to Salesforce Marketing Cloud emails

You can easily add Vidyard videos to your marketing emails in Salesforce Marketing Cloud's content builder.

Simply copy the email campaign embed code for your video and paste it into an HTML block in the email editor.

Since video playback is not supported inside most email clients, the email campaign code adds your video's thumbnail image with a play button to the body of the email. When clicked, the image links your email recipients to a your branded sharing page where they can watch your video.

Requirements

You must have a role of either Administrator or Marketing Cloud Content Editor/Publisher to create and edit emails in the Content Builder

• read more about Marketing Cloud roles and permissions

Adding video to your marketing email

You can create an email with Marketing Cloud's Content Builder in several different ways (from a template, an existing email, or text-only). So long as you do not build a text-only email, you can add your video's email embed code to the editor.

1. From the main menu in Marketing Cloud, select Content Builder > Content Builder
2. Select Create > Email Message to build a new email
   • Make sure to choose Template or Existing Email as the method for building your new email
3. Give your Email a name, description and other properties, then select Next
4. Click and drag the HTML block onto the email layout
5. Copy and paste the email campaign embed code for your video (obtained from Vidyard) in to the code editor
   
   • You should see your video's thumbnail image appear where you placed the HTML block in the content editor.

How to identify contacts who watch your video

To ensure each email recipient who watches your video is properly identified in Vidyard, you'll need to add a special string to the video URL in the embed code.

The string combines Vidyard's identification parameter with Marketing Cloud's personalization string (merge tag) for recipient email addresses: ?vyemail= and %%emailaddr%%

1. Find share.vidyard.com/watch/ in the <a href> tag of the embed code
2. Add ?vyemail=%%emailaddr%% to the end of the URL

The end result should look like this:

<a href="https://share.vidyard.com/watch/JJkazZR7foHWFu4KPa?vyemail=%%emailaddr%%" target="_blank" title="short video">

How to adjust the size of the thumbnail image

In addition to the editing options in Marketing Cloud's content builder, you can also edit the thumbnail's <img> tag to change its size.

For example, add width="640" and height="360" to the <img> tag to make the thumbnail larger.

<img src="//cdn.vidyard.com/thumbnails/7812491HSA1BRNEUDYpjo5QMMH_play_button_small.jpg" alt="Yukon" width="640" height="360/>