The short answer? You should not.

Many campaign managers want to embed a video into an email blast to allow interaction with your content. Though you can embed videos into your activities, email is a different platform.  Most email programs like Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, etc. do not support embedded video. Your recipient's email service provider may also mark your organization as a spammer if you attempt to embed a video directly into your emails. We recommend adding a link to your video into your email instead. If you want a graphical representation, get a screen capture of your video instead, and embed that into your email.

Taking Your Own Video Screenshot

If you do not have a thumbnail of the video yet, use native tools on your computer or a downloadable plug-in for your browser.  For a walkthrough on getting a screenshot, please review the respective tutorials or plugins:

• Taking a screenshot on a Mac
• Taking a screenshot on Windows 10
• Chrome Plugin 
• FireFox Plugin

Once you have the screenshot/image downloaded on your computer, upload the image to Engage's Assets repository. To see how to add images to Salsa Engage and then edit them, click here. Please review our best practices for image production here. 

Linking to Your Video

If you already have the screenshot uploaded into your Engage account, add the image to your email blast and link to the video. You can link an image to any external page through the image editor.

Once the image is linked, run a test of your blast to ensure that the expected behavior and experience for your supporter happens.