Everybody wants to embed videos into their HTML emails. The sad truth is they break more often than not. There are promising developments here and there (and Mark Brownlow has a great roundup here).
But the fact of the matter is the safest thing you can do is generate a screenshot of your YouTube video player, insert that image into your email, then link it to your actual video landing page.
It’s a miserable process that we just made easier with our YouTube (and Blip.tv and Vimeo) merge tag…
If you want to include a video in your MailChimp campaign, and it’s hosted on YouTube, Blip.tv or Vimeo, just get the video ID, and stick it in our new video merge tag like this:
MailChimp will go to the video, grab its keyframe (a still image from your video), then overlay some video control elements to make it look playable:
Whenever users click, it’ll take them to the hosted version of your video.
No need to screenshot anything, upload to MailChimp, etc. Just use the merge tag, and you’re done.
Love the video integration…how do you think this will work for your business customers given Vimeo’s stance on removing commercial video content?
Hi Jamie, I’ve personally been shut down by Vimeo, and can attest to the fact that it’s not a fun process. It’s their prerogative though. And we now gladly pay for Blip.tv’s corporate account. In terms of our customers, they are sending commercial email, but they’re not always embedding commercial videos. Sometimes they just want to post something entertaining that they saw on vimeo.
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[...] Chimp have made this easier to do, provided your videos are on YouTube, blip.tv or Vimeo. You can read more about it on their blog. That’s one thing I do like about the WP blog, it’s pretty easy [...]
Looks great! Are the merge tags hidden somewhere special? I don’t see them anywhere.
I’m in the same boat with Dwayne. Where are the Video merge tags found? YouTube is not in my drop down list.
I read the PDF of merge tags and could not find it.
Help!
Hi Joe,
You’ll find what you need in the following Knowledge Base article– http://eepurl.com/gYZj
Thanks Amanda.
I used chat to support. They told me to just paste in the tag
Working like a dream!
And the fact that the video ID is everything to the right of the = sign in the URL.
Both are key pieces of info to know.
Joe
This feature looks great, but I’m wondering if there’s any way to have the video link to a page on our site instead of on Youtube, Vimeo, or blip.
In our use case, we embed all of our Youtube and Blip videos on our own site because we want to drive people back to our site.
So we want to use the video ID to generate the video thumbnail with the “player” around it, but we want to be able to specify a custom URL to link the image to. Any way to do this with the current tags?
Ben,
Right from the article:
“But the fact of the matter is the safest thing you can do is generate a screenshot of your YouTube video player, insert that image into your email, then link it to your actual video landing page.”
So you make a screenshot of the video and link it to your site.
Dwayne,
Thanks for the reply, but I’m hoping to do this without all of that manual work. As I understand it, the whole idea of the Mailchimp video merge tag is that you specifically wouldn’t have to manually create the image.
So what I’m asking is if there’s a way to specify a custom URL for use with the Mailchimp video merge tag.
–Ben
Speaking of video Ben, can I ask what screencast application you guys use to capture those cool multi-angle shots for your tutorial videos?
Or are you somehow adding those effects in post?
Cheers,
Justin
Screenflow + After Effects.
Thanks Ben. I’m really impressed with your tutorials. I’m working on a number of them for my company as well. It looks like I will need to spend some time with After Effects so we can inject a bit more “wow” into our videos as you guys have done. Keep up the great work!
wow! very slick, indeed.
Now if we could just take what you guys developed and make it something like this
*|VIDEO:(url)|* and it pulls the screenshot and links to the URL.
Does it have to be a specific file type like FLV which i believe all those sites above are. This would be what Ben is looking for. Also it would be very beneficial for me too as i would prefer the customer going to our website vs one of the video sites. The page can be more tailored then too.
Yes, what Justin is suggesting would be really helpful. I’d just modify the merge tag to be in the following format:
*|YOUTUBE:[VIDEOID]:[URL]|*
Thus, you would be able to specify both the YouTube (or Vimeo/Blip) Video ID, as well as a destination page. If someone didn’t specify a destination URL and used the merge tag currently as is, it would point to the YouTube hosted page.
Ben, does this seem feasible? Would this be difficult to program?
–The Other Ben
If you really feel you need to send people to an alternate link, there’s a manual way to do that, though you may draw the ire of some subscribers who may believe you are mis-leading them.
1) Insert the proper video merge tag
2) Load the Campaign Preview – this will generate the preview/player image and store it in your (free) Image Gallery
3) Remove the video tag
4) Insert the image and size/link/style/etc it however you’d like
Of course once it’s been generated once, there’s no need to generate it again if you need to reuse it. We’ll consider an option to allow automating that in the future, but don’t hold your breath for too long….
Also, because of the way we generate these preview images, we can’t currently just support any generic video service or file type – support for specific providers has to be manually tailored for each.
I cant see all the comments. As there was a follow up to my comment.
When i said *|VIDEO:(url)|* – The video would tell mailchimp hey its a video lets run the script to do the screenshots. The url is the page the video is on. My thought is i would host the video on my server.
One thought better. *|VIDEO:(url),User:Pass|* to allow the user and mailchimp to be able to get into a protected video section. Sneak peaks that you dont want open to the public via Youtube or other sites.
Offering automated screen-grab and skinning for 3 known content providers is entirely different than trying to automate the extraction of video on anyone’s website coded in any way possible.
How would the script even know where the video is? It could be an object tag, could be a div or tag that uses jQuery to pop in video, or one of a million other ways. There would be no way for them to know what is a regular flash file for site features (such as ads or nav) and what is a video. Really, it’s just a crazy request!
Honestly, I dont think my request was crazy though.
Mailchimp would just have to tell us how they want the video to be identified so they know which one to grab. It could be must be in FLV format, must be a object or video tag, ect.
2nd a direct video url could used so the program knows what video to use.
Would be great to also have this capability for Smugmug…
yes, a 2nd request for smugmug.
this thing doesn’t seem to work. when i click on “advanced merge tag reference” i can’t find anything about youtube. then i tried copying the code from this page *|YOUTUBE:xxxx|* and that didn’t work, it just shows up how it’s written. can someone explain to me how this easy gadget works?
It would be great if we could specify a width for the video. The video distorts some templates where the video is wider than the template content width.
I said the same thing, then noticed you can just embed the video with the tag, then resize the image down as necessary. Would that work for you?
It also smashes up my template while the width of the content area is only 400px.. any way to work around this??
without having to choose multimedia and then insert the picture manually and the video link?? it kind of take the smart thing off the automatic process with the mergetag
Did you figure out how to change the size of an embeded video .. anyone?
Thanks
unfortunately not.. i had explain my client to do it the “hard” way to get the screendump from media library after previewing the mail.. but far from an optimal solution…
You should see an additional option to set a maximum width in our next release…
I did see that the image gets stored in the media library. But this would require, previewing the email – this grabs the video image – then getting into the media library to grab the image. I would still need to apply the link to the video.
Wonderful! Going to try this later this week.
It works perfectly!
Is there a way to have the video play within the e-mail?
I’m just getting started and not too good with these tags. I just be mssing something.
I used
*|YOUTUBE:v=sHMWcQbFyt8|*
to link to this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHMWcQbFyt8
but it doesn’t work. I do know that after the v the instructions say to use a different character is that necessary.
oh, I figured it out. i should not have put the v= in there, only
sHMWcQbFyt8
Great feature, but I have an additional request. Could there be a way to pull the most recent youtube clip a user has uploaded?
I’d like to use the video merge with my RSS campaign, but I’d have to manually insert our most recent video campaign. It’d be much nicer if there was a merge tag to pull the most recent clip.
Any chance of that?
Thanks. We’ve been contemplating making these work inside RSS campaigns too, so that they could be more automated.
Yeah, that would be great. I’m not sure how your system works, obviously your far more the expert then I am. But I imagine you could dynamically pull the most recent video id from the rss feed for whatever user account name we entered.
So we do something like *|YOUTUBE:USERNAME|* and it goes to the RSS and pulls the most recent video id
Right, basically make it so that our rss-to-email tool:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/rss/
works with youtube w/out any intervention.
Is this the case yet Ben?
Hi Andy, not yet. I *just* posted that comment confirming what Ariah was requesting. Heh. We need timestamps on blog comments. Blog revamp is in the works.
I noticed the earlier posts about being able to modify the width of the video.
Has that been added, or not yet?
It sure has. All the info you need can be found in our Knowledge Base: How do I control the size of the screenshot in the video merge tag?: http://eepurl.com/EwvV
Any chance we could embed prezi presentations the same way?
I am curious if there are any updates on the easy integration of video in RSS [email to rss] campaigns. I have one set up that uses youtube videos – but it is not pulling in the video at all.
I am not seeing the merge tags for you tube video. were the dropped with the recent upgrade?
They are still supported. See the “Videos” section here:
http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/all-the-merge-tags-cheatsheet#Social
This YouTube video integration is pretty great, but I would also like to be able to suppress the video title, stars, and rating.
They spoil my clean and simple layouts.
Maybe you could add additional parameters. For example: *|YOUTUBE:TZ860P4iTaM:120:notitle:nostars:norating|*
Thanks!
Is there a way to change the size of the video with the merge tag? I’m having issues where my video shows up but the size of it alters my layout completely.
Yep, you’d use: *|YOUTUBE:video_id:max_width|* or *|BLIPTV:video_id:max_width|*, etc.
Bookmark our merge tag cheatsheet –
http://mailchimp.com/merge/
Hi–
Is there any mechanism to remove the text around these YouTube videos? All of the rating stars, view info and titling is ruining my template’s mojo.
Thanks.
-John
I’ll second that, John!
Or at least to change the colour of this text so it fits with my design??
Oh wait…. I worked out how to change the colour of the text… but still interested in deleting it all together!
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Bummer! It appears as if it embeds this NICELY, but TOO WIDE for my template. It blows out all the rest of the newsletter. Is there a way to format this same thing with parameters of only 350 pixels wide instead of the larger image????
Yeah, there’s a max width setting.
That, and other ways to customize, are detailed here:
http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/can-i-include-music-video-in-my-campaigns