How did we do it? Video in email special

Video in email - how did we do it?

Before we get into the making of Email Weekly - At the end of this post, you can find the 2x blog post links to tell you why you should use video in your email marketing and how to technically use video in your email marketing - Alisha

For this special Email Weekly, we wanted to bring together some techniques that I had been playing with over the last few months to bring video into email. Typically - I shared what I had found with the marketing team, Alisha and Bex in their monthly marketing drop in.

“Jay just casually dropped in that he has figured out a cool new way to use video in email…” - Bex, Head of Marketing.

I showed a demo using the classic Big Buck Bunny video - https://parcel.io/e/f210e03c-bfeb-463f-85a6-f8442e465297?wrap=true and we quickly decided we needed something better than that.

So the marketing brains got going and as usual we wanted to test it out in Email Weekly and the world cup had just started, the idea was born - a video about football in the newsletter. Oh and ready to send in 2 weeks please!

We had a few problems to solve:

1. Technically pull the email off with Video
2. Create a cool design
3. Learn some stuff about football (I know nothing)
4. Oh yer - we need a video!

Number 1 was the easiest, I just spent a day locked away in the dark making sure I learned all the ins and outs of putting video in email, a normal working day really.

For the other three we needed to bring in the big guns - after previously working with Lloyd and Phillip from Multiplied on a special Halloween email weekly, we had been chatting about video and I had shared some snippets of what I had been testing, so they knew I was planning something and a quick slack message later, we were all on a call discussing what we could do.

Similar to how we work closely with clients and partners, the first step is a big open discussion on ideas. Some that didn’t make the cut this time:

• Silly facts about the World Cup. The number of pints the Scottish team drank in Boston, the number of hot dogs sold, the highest price ticket, that sort of thing.
• Putting an advert together for the world cup final
• The ActionRocket team attempting to play football

But then Phillip had a great idea to intertwine the story of video in football with the story of video in email we were trying to tell - and the rest is history as we’d say. The following days were interspersed with cool things Phillip and Lloyd had found, with feedback on the mechanism for showing the video.

Almost a week had passed and we jumped on a call to get a final idea together - and I must admit we got a bit carried away, I said some things, Lloyd and Phillip egged me on and now I needed to code a fully working TV remote in the email, to switch channels and show off what could be done. Bex was about to go away on holiday and her parting remarks were - “You do realise we are short on time already…” - so we agreed that was everything we were going to do (oh and make the first channel personalised - thanks Lloyd!)

We split off into our respective teams to get started.

Working on a project like this needs some enthusiasm, a little bit of craziness to push what is possible and to have a team that you can trust to go away and do what is needed. ActionRocket has the techy email specific development skills to pull off stupid awesome ideas in recipients inboxes and Multiplied have the video and motion animation, plus personalisation design chops needed for this kind of thing.

Slacks flying back and forth over the next few days with - is this possible? Can we make an ActionRocket x Multiplied logo lock up? Shall we add a working power button to the remote? Then we had a finalised design, a proof of concept build, story boards for the videos and animations.

Now we needed to put it all together - Jay was building the email, Phillip sorted the design, Lloyd worked his magic on personalising all the GIFs and Multiplied creating 3x awesome videos! Alisha managed to wrangle the data and manage the project.

You can see the final result online. You get to work on a lot of cool projects at ActionRocket, but whenever we get to showcase something cool in Email Weekly and pair up with one of our awesome partners, a little bit of email magic happens!

Okay the more boring professional bits. To understand why putting video in your email is a good marketing move, check out our first blog post, ‘Video in email’. Get under the hood of the code and technical know how in the second blog post, ‘Making Video work in email’.

Thanks again to the team at Multiplied for all the epic work!