How To Embed Video In Gmail Message

If you're a marketer and you're emailing a larger group of people, say daily or weekly, then you want to be using a proper email service provider. But sometimes you just want to use good old-fashioned Gmail. And if you're looking for ways to increase your click-through rate, your open rate, and frankly just your overall engagement with your emails, then you want to think about including a video. So there are 3 things that you're going to need. One is an image. You will need to have an email account, a Gmail account, and you will also need to have a place to host your video. I'm using YouTube as the example host today. You could be using Wistia. As long as you're able to generate a link, you will be good to go. So let's get started with how this works. I have my Gmail open. I'm composing a message just as I normally would. So let me just go to the top. Let's just say I'm writing an email here, blah blah blah, and I'm writing the copy. Okay, wonderful. I'm putting the subject line in. I like to use video, the word video, in the subject line of my, of my video. So let's just put subject line here because the word video increases your open rate significantly. I've heard of stats as high as 60+ percent higher open rates when the word video is in the subject line. So you want to include that in here and you could use any of these parentheses that you want. This one happens to be the more fancy squiggly one, or you could use the nice square one. So let's just say we're using that one. Now, where you place your image in the email is entirely up to you. Write your copy and then add the image in. The image could be as simple as a screenshot of the video you want people to watch. So for example, if I go to my desktop, I took a screenshot of my vertical video. In this case here, I'll show you what it looks like. So we'll bring that in. This is just simply a screenshot of the video that I want them to watch. If you want to take this to the next level, though, here, I'll show you another way to do this. I would bring the screenshot into Canva, go to YouTube thumbnail. The template is 1280 by 720 pixels. I chose my purple background. You could choose white. It doesn't really matter what color you choose in the background. I think that a color looks good against the white background of the email because it will pop and stand out a little bit more. So let's just say for— I'm going to use my purple color. I've imported the screenshot of my video onto the image that I'm creating. I could move this over here and I could add some things to it. For example, I could go and add a play button. So I've just searched play button here and I will choose— oh, it doesn't really matter. Let's choose this one. And I'll make it white. And I could even make that a little smaller. We'll put it right centered in the middle. And if I wanted to add some text here on the side, let's just say I'm talking about here, Stay Fearless, which I love. Okay, let's move this. And I want to add some text onto the image. And what I would do is I would position this behind the play button. So now you've got something like this. Again, play with this to your heart's content. Make it look however you'd like it to look. Download the image and then come back into your email and upload that image. So I have one that is a little more simple looking than that one. The original one here. So let's bring this in. And now I'm going to show you the trick to getting this image to be linked to your video, and there is a little bit of a trick to it. So watch what I do. I have my cursor now way over here on the right-hand side of the screen. I'm going to swipe across from right to left until the image turns blue. And when I scroll up here, let me just go up a little higher so we can see this. Hold on a second. Get this up a little bit higher. Okay, so bring this across till it's blue. And you can see it's under the bar, so it's hard to see, but it says, it says remove, keep original size if you want it to be smaller. Don't really play with that. What you want to do is go down to the Insert Link button. Now you're going back into the YouTube video that you've already uploaded to your channel, but you've set it to unlisted. If you don't want other people to see this publicly, set it to unlisted. You still have access to the URL that you can then come back into your email, to your Gmail, and paste and hit OK. Now, when I click on the image, you'll see that it says the image will go to this link, which is the YouTube video. So when a person opens your email, they see this image. And again, if you've added some other things like a play button and words on the screen to entice them to want to click it, they're going to click this and it's going to take them to the video on YouTube. At which point they're going to watch it. Hope you enjoyed that tip. Here's your next video, how to share your Keynote slides on Facebook Live using Ecamm, and I'll see you in the next video.