We are often asked by marketers about the incorporation of video into email campaigns. They wonder if our platform can handle the insertion of Flash videos into HTML templates. In this age of viral video campaigns and widespread use of Flash videos on websites and advertisements, these questions are certainly expected.

It is important for marketers to understand that the insertion of Flash videos is not a limitation of your e-communication service provider. Any HTML can be inserted into a template and deployed by your platform. The problem lies on the side of the recipient's email client, which will likely strip-out the JavaScript which enables the video to play. The message will render without any JavaScript-driven elements. A before-and-after illustration of a YouTube.com page is shown below:

As you can see, not only is the Flash video not rendered (an error message is shown instead), but even the JavaScript-driven presidential campaign advertisement is blank.

So, should you just remove video messaging from your marketing mix altogether? Of course not! This is a simple rendering issue, not a catastrophic problem. Simply use an image (instead of a video) that links to the webpage where the video is hosted. An example of the image before rendering (with the all-important Alt-Tag that describes the image) and after rendering is shown below.

This strategy is not just better with regard to the usability and rendering of the message. It will improve click-through rates, expose your subscribers to more content and improve conversion rates. It is amazing how quickly the online community has become conditioned to click on that little gray "play" arrow whenever we see it. I'd love to see an eye-tracking (or EKG) study done on user groups who view images with and without "play" arrows.

The other little-known advantage of playing that video on your website is in the ability to do JavaScript-based Flash analytics. The best way to know if someone actually clicked on a Flash application, let it run until the end, or clicked on any additional links within the Flash application is to use JavaScript codes to track those events. Of course, you now know that JavaScript doesn't work in email clients, but it does work on websites (on approximately 98.8% of end-users' browsers).

So, if you want to insert video messaging into your marketing mix, remember three things: use an image to draw subscribers to the webpage where your video is hosted, use an Alt-Tag to encourage subscribers to render that image, and incorporate JavaScript-based Flash application tracking on your web site. Of course, all of those JavaScript limitations of email are lifted in RSS, so exploring RSS is an advisable workaround as well.