How to Use Video in Email Marketing
Email inboxes are the most competitive real estate in marketing. The average professional receives 121 emails per day (Radicati Group). Open rates across B2B are hovering around 20–25%. Click-through rates average just 2–3%.
Video changes those numbers.
Adding video to an email increases click-through rates by 65% (Campaign Monitor). Including the word “video” in a subject line boosts open rates by 19% (Syndacast). And when someone clicks to watch a video you’ve sent them, the amount of information they retain is dramatically higher than anything they’d absorb from the email copy itself.
The challenge isn’t belief, most marketers know video works. The challenge is execution. Most email clients don’t play video natively. Getting the link, thumbnail, and placement right is non-obvious. And producing a video worth embedding in the first place has historically been the real bottleneck.
This guide covers the mechanics, the strategy, and the production workflow so you can start using video in email this week, not next quarter.
Why Video Works in Email
Before getting into the how, it’s worth understanding the mechanism, because it shapes every decision about format, placement, and content type.
Attention is the scarce resource. An email recipient decides in under three seconds whether to read or delete. A video thumbnail a still image of a face, a scene, or a play button - triggers a different cognitive response than a block of text. It signals “something different is here,” which earns a moment of attention that copy alone rarely gets.
Video communicates more per second. A 60-second video can convey tone, energy, context, and nuance that would take 500 words to approximate - and even then wouldn’t land the same way. For product updates, personal outreach, and anything where trust matters, video closes the gap between sending a message and actually connecting.
It’s still underused enough to stand out. Most email programs are text-heavy. Most marketing emails look identical. A well-placed video thumbnail in an inbox full of text creates genuine contrast. That contrast is a compounding advantage while most senders haven’t made the switch.
The Technical Reality: How Video in Email Actually Works
Here’s something most guides skip: video doesn’t autoplay in email.
The majority of email clients, including Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail don’t support embedded video playback. Sending an email with an embedded video player either shows a broken placeholder or gets blocked entirely by spam filters.
What actually works is a video thumbnail linked to the hosted video. A static image (usually a screenshot from the video with a play button overlay) sits inside the email. When the reader clicks it, they’re taken to the hosted video, either on your website, on a video platform, or on a shareable link from your video tool.
Done well, this performs better than autoplay anyway. A compelling thumbnail earns the click. The click signals intent. By the time they’re watching the video, they’ve chosen to engage, which is a fundamentally different mental state than a video that just starts playing at them.
The three-part setup:
- Host the video somewhere with a stable URL (Velo, Wistia, Vimeo, YouTube, or a direct shareable link)
- Create a thumbnail a static image from the video, ideally with a visible play button
- Embed the thumbnail as a linked image in your email, pointing to the hosted video URL
That’s it. Everything else is refinement.
6 Types of Video That Belong in Email
Not every email is a good candidate for video. These are the use cases where video consistently outperforms text.
| Video Type | Best Email Context | Why It Works |
|---|---|---|
| Personal outreach video | Cold or warm sales email | Face and voice build trust where text can’t |
| Product update video | Customer newsletter, changelog email | Shows the feature in context; no reading required |
| Onboarding walkthrough | Activation sequence, day-1 email | Demonstrates value faster than written instructions |
| Customer story / testimonial | Mid-funnel nurture, renewal email | Social proof is more credible on video than in a quote |
| Event / webinar invite | Event promotion email | Preview of speaker or content drives registration |
| Thank you / follow-up | Post-demo, post-purchase | Human touch at a high-value moment |
The highest-ROI place to start is usually product update emails. You’re already sending them. Adding a 60-second “here’s what’s new” screen recording with a thumbnail increases click-through without requiring a new campaign or list segment.
How to Add Video to Your Email Campaigns: Step by Step
Step 1: Record or produce the video
Keep it short. For email contexts, under 90 seconds is the target for most video types. Under 60 seconds for prospecting and follow-up. Product updates can run 2–3 minutes if the content justifies it.
The production bar is lower than most marketers assume. A clean screen recording with good audio and a polished output, not a studio production is what performs. The key is that it looks intentional, not like something you recorded and immediately uploaded without reviewing.
AI tools like Velo can take a raw screen recording or rough take and produce a clean, branded video automatically removing filler words, adding smart zooms, applying your brand kit, and generating a shareable link. For teams sending video email at volume, this eliminates the production bottleneck that typically kills the program.
Step 2: Host it and get a shareable URL
Upload to whichever platform fits your workflow. Options and their trade-offs:
- Velo: Branded shareable link, view analytics, works natively for screen and face recordings
- Wistia: Built for marketing video, deep analytics, integrates with HubSpot and Marketo
- Vimeo: Clean embed pages, good for polished content, less analytics depth for email
- YouTube: High trust, unlisted videos work fine, no email-specific analytics
- Loom: Simple and fast, good for personal outreach videos
For any use case where you want to know who watched and how long, choose a platform with view-level analytics. Knowing that a prospect watched your follow-up video three times before responding changes your next conversation.
Step 3: Create a thumbnail
The thumbnail is doing most of the work. It’s the visual that earns the click before a single frame of video plays. A few things that consistently perform:
- Show a face. Human faces in thumbnails outperform text-only or product-only images in almost every A/B test. If the video includes a presenter, use a frame where they’re engaged and looking forward.
- Add a play button overlay. It signals “this is a video” instantly. A simple triangle icon in the center of the image is enough.
- Include a specific visual. If the video is a product walkthrough, show the product on screen. If it’s a personal outreach video, a frame where your name or company is visible signals personalization.
- Keep text minimal. A short caption (“Watch: 60-second product update”) below the image is useful; text overlaid on the thumbnail gets cluttered.
Most video tools let you set a custom thumbnail. If not, take a screenshot from a strong frame in the video and add a play button in Canva or Figma in under five minutes.
Step 4: Embed the thumbnail in your email
In your email builder (Mailchimp, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Brevo, etc.), insert the thumbnail as an image and link it to your hosted video URL. Add alt text (“Watch:
“) for accessibility and for recipients whose images are blocked.
Position matters. Above the fold is where video thumbnails perform best - within the first visible section of the email, before the reader has to scroll. Don’t bury it at the bottom after 400 words of copy.
Step 5: Write the surrounding copy to earn the click
The email body around the thumbnail has one job: give the reader enough context to click play. Two to three sentences maximum.
What works: tell them what they’ll learn, see, or feel in the video. “I recorded a 90-second walkthrough of the feature we shipped this week- here’s what it does and why we built it.” That’s it. Don’t summarize the video in text. If they can get the information from reading the email, there’s no reason to click.
Step 6: Track and iterate
At minimum, track clicks on the thumbnail link in your email platform. Better: use a video hosting platform with viewer-level analytics so you can see who watched, for how long, and where they dropped off.
Run simple A/B tests: thumbnail image A vs. B, subject line with “video” vs. without, video above fold vs. below. Even small data samples from a few sends will show you which variables move click-through most in your specific list.
Best Practices for Video Email That Gets Watched
Write “video” in the subject line. It’s one of the few subject line tactics with consistent, documented impact on open rates. “[Video] What we shipped this week” reliably outperforms the same line without it.
Match the video length to the email type. Personal outreach: 60 seconds. Product update: 90 seconds to 2 minutes. Tutorial or walkthrough: up to 3 minutes. Event preview: 30–60 seconds. Longer than that and you’re better off linking to a full content page.
Don’t narrate the video in the email copy. If your email copy tells the whole story, the video becomes redundant. Write the copy to create curiosity, not to deliver information.
Send from a person, not a brand. For any video that includes a presenter on screen, sending from a named individual (“Mia from Velo”) rather than a company name (“The Velo Team”) significantly increases open and click rates. It matches the expectation - there’s a real person in the video, and the email should feel like it came from that person.
Test on mobile before sending. Thumbnails that look sharp on desktop can appear oversized, blurry, or misaligned on mobile. Most email platforms offer a mobile preview. Use it.
Tools for Video Email Marketing
| Tool | Best For | Video Analytics | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Velo | AI-polished screen recordings and outreach video | View tracking, watch time | Free + paid plans |
| Wistia | Marketing teams, HubSpot/Marketo integration | Deep viewer analytics, heatmaps | From $19/month |
| Vidyard | Sales teams, Salesforce integration | Per-viewer data, CRM sync | Free + paid plans |
| Loom | Fast personal video, async communication | Basic view and watch data | Free + paid plans |
| Vimeo | Polished branded content | Basic analytics | From $20/month |
The takeaway: If you’re sending video in a sales or CS context and need to know exactly who watched what, Vidyard or Wistia give you the most actionable data. If the bottleneck is production, getting videos polished enough to feel worth sending, Velo solves that problem at the recording stage.
Ready to start sending video emails that actually get watched? Try Velo free – record, polish, and share a video link in under 5 minutes.