Share video in an email campaign

Adding video to your email marketing campaigns is an effective way to increase clickthrough rates and promote engagement with your message.

You can use the Email Campaign embed option in Vidyard to easily copy a hyperlinked video thumbnail into your email campaigns and templates. 

The thumbnail acts as the focal point of your email and directs viewers to the video sharing page or a custom URL of your choice. This is a great way to re-engage contacts that you've already collected in an email list and capture video analytics related to each viewer's engagement in Vidyard.

Copy the email campaign embed code

1. Select the Share button next to a video in your library
2. Click on the button to open the embed options
3. Open the Email Campaign tab
4. Choose where you want your viewers to watch the video when they click on the thumbnail image:
   • Select Link to Sharing Page to direct viewers to the Vidyard-hosted page where the video is embedded (remember: you can customize your sharing page).
   • Select Link to custom URL to specify a different landing page where you have embedded the video
5. Select Copy Code

Add the video to your campaign

Once you've obtained the embed code from Vidyard, you can add the video thumbnail to a template in your email marketing provider. In the example below we've used MailChimp as our tool of choice.

Paste the code into the HTML editor that your provider uses to build email templates. You may need to preview how and where the video thumbnail appears and adjust accordingly. 

In addition to the editing options in your tool's template builder, you can also add a width= parameter to the <img> tag to adjust the size. We added a width="640" at the end of the following example:

<img src="//cdn.vidyard.com/thumbnails/7812491/QyziddECIj_dLht0sc26lblhNvwc_play_button_small.jpg" alt="Yukon" width="640"/>

Identifying viewers in an email campaign

One the most effective ways to identify viewers from your distribution list and capture their video engagement data in Vidyard is to use an email merge tag.

Email merge tags allow you to insert unique user data from a recipient's contact record into an email to personalize or substitute information. When used in combination with a special URL argument from Vidyard called a "vyemail" string, you can dynamically identify each recipient who watches your video.

Building a dynamic link with a merge tag

1. In the email campaign code that Vidyard provides, find the URL of the page where your video is embedded. It should look similar to the following:
   

   <a href="https://share.vidyard.com/watch/HSA1BRNEUDY5QDMMHhkojp?">

2. Following the ? at the end of the URL, add vyemail= as a parameter
   • If a query already exists, then simply add an ampersand (&) before vyemail, like so autoplay=1&vyemail=

     <a href="https://share.vidyard.com/watch/HSA1BRNEUDY5QDMMHhkojp?vyemail=">

3. Add the merge tag for your email distribution tool after the vyemail string
   • We'll use MailChimp's tag of *|EMAIL|* in this example:

<a href="https://share.vidyard.com/watch/HSA1BRNEUDY5QDMMHhkojp?vyemail=*|EMAIL|*">

Marketing tools with dynamic email merge fields

We've put together a short list merge tags from common email distribution tools. Always double check your tool's documentation to verify that you're using the correct email merge tag.

Other ways to add video to email

Not everyone has an email marketing software tool, and that's okay. You can still add videos to email with either the Vidyard web app or the Copy Link and Thumbnail sharing option.

The Vidyard web app

The Vidyard web app allows you to access your personal video library and share videos with contacts in an email message. You'll find the app in a growing number of integrated products that you already use—Gmail, Outlook, SalesLoft, Outreach + many more. 

Copy link and Thumbnail

The copy link and thumbnail sharing option allows you to paste a hyperlinked thumbnail image of your video into an email message. When clicked, the image links your viewer to the video sharing page.

You can paste the link and thumbnail into any editor that supports rich text and images (Gmail, Outlook, Outreach, Salesloft, Zendesk, WordPress, Google Docs, etc).

1. Select the  Share button next to a video in your library
2. Click on Copy Link and Thumbnail
3. Paste the link into an email message