Welcome to the club of those who wonder how to send multimedia elements such as Flash videos or within an email.

This article will explain the options, recommendations and a step by step instruction method
simple and effective way to insert a video into your message.

A little history explains this
The email, the oldest and most popular tool of the Internet, managed its development thanks to the simplicity of its protocols (standards of communication between server and mail client), called POP3 and SMTP. The rapid adoption of these standards led to the network that binds us together today, and stored without being connected to us via e-mail sent from anywhere in the world until we decide to read it, and if this were not enough, for FREE.

Any progress in the development of new Internet standards is always the need to safeguard the effectiveness of e-mail, even if there are groups of people and applications called "early adopters" who adopted progress first (many times beta versions, which used to fix bugs), these developments are slow to reach the mass audience.

In conclusion to date (February 2009), if your message or newsletter, needs to be read by a large number of people, where the same used by different applications to read your mail (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) should use the standard email formats, which are basically two: plain text and HTML, these two formats are used in parallel to design a newsletter to generate the highest rate of reading as possible.

Although associated with the design to HTML of a web page, the same, when used in the design of emails requires some adaptations (and limitations), which are imposed by mail applications to take charge of interpreting and presenting the reader some of these limitations have to do with not allowing the screening of a video, animated images or Flash application in the mail application.

Although these limitations vary by platform-mail, video playback, is a limitation that are the most commonly used today as Microsoft Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail (perhaps in the future and in later versions of these mailers are allowed .)

Now leaving the restrictions, we commented that if there is an alternative that allows anyone who want to include a video in your newsletter, save the technical disadvantages.

From a marketing point of view, our goal is to seduce the reader that it is attracted and willing to see the video.

The steps to achieve this objective are:

1. Upload and publish your video on your Web page or a video server as YOUTUBE.COM.

   If you upload the video on your own server (where your Web page), note the time of loading and playing, because when you send email, it will create several simultaneous visits to reproduce the same, and may not be the result optimal.

   If you use as servers VIDEO YOUTUBE.COM, VIMEO.COM, VIDEO.MSN.COM, the performance of these is very good, and most are free.

   YOUTUBE Where should upload AVI, WMV or MOV, with a resolution of 320 × 300 pixels, remember the limitation of a maximum of 100mb and not more than 10 minutes duration (less than 4 minutes recommended to avoid disperse the viewer)
   

2. Get the link (link) of the video video

   In the case of YouTube, this link (URL) is of type http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MLAe4RcVS4

   Youtube also gives the option to embed video on your own Web page as an object (see how in http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=es&answer=57788 )

3. Generate an image of the video.

   Making an impression of your browser screen that plays video (PC: Alt + Print Screen or MAC: Command + Shift +3) and then cut the section of video that we are interested in a program editor.

4. Edit the e-newsletter, in our E-Nvía tool, and insert the video image within the HTML content of our message to insert the image in step 3, then generate a link to our video address obtained in step 2.

5. Add a legend in small letters below the video that says "Click on image to view the video"

This technique is recommended to get our contact information (newsletter reader) watch our video, as any email application will display the static image in the bulletin, and clicking anywhere on the image, our mail application use the browser to display the video directly on the Web.

An important point is to select very well the most representative video image in step 3, since it

will be responsible for convincing the reader to click to project the video.

If you want to include in your newsletter, different videos, you can repeat the above steps for each video.

Although at first we may seem better than the video playback in the same mailer (email), remember that our ability to Internet communication, is to use the interactivity, meaning leave the side of the reader's ability interact and seduce us the ability to make decisions that lead us to realizing our message.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 13, 2009 at 4:07 pm and is in E-Nvía Features , Videos (step by step guides) . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your website.