Well, let’s start with online video in general - how popular is it?
According to Universal McCann, 74.2% of US Internet users watched online video daily or every other day in 2008. And, Nielsen measured that in May 2008, people spent 4.5 minutes per day watching online video. Video content is only a click or two away at Yahoo, Google, You Tube, etc., so it should come as no surprise that…

A whopping ¾ of the internet viewing public watch at least some video on the web daily.

But what about video in email?
Can you include video in your next email? What about webmail? HTML5?

The simple answer is -  not really…
But maybe we’re asking the wrong questions.
Maybe the question that should be posed isn’t “How do you embed video in your email?”, but rather “What are the current best strategies for getting my video delivered?”

An incorporating solution - not quite video in email but a viable solution
The easiest and most foolproof way is to include a still poster frame into the email that has a big play button on it and links to a web version of your email. People click on the video play button and then are transported to the same creative on the web - but with an autoplay version of the video. The user experience will be almost identical to if the video was actually playing in the email.

And what about other options like…
HTML5
There are some promising developments in HTML5 which has a <video> tag. But it doesn’t have acceptance yet.

Animated gifs
You can convert your video to an animated gif, but these files are weighty, blocked by many email clients and companies - and still don’t look like real video.

Webmail
Webmail clients like yahoo mail, and gmail won’t play video.

Does it work at all in email?
Actually Apple Mail, entourage 2008, and the iphone will play video. But these have a pretty darn low marketshare.

So to sum up…
A quick tour of the web shows just how ubiquitous video has become and how important it is in many companies’ online marketing efforts.

But to transport a video experience to your email marketing efforts, it is still most reliable to drive the user to a web page that plays the video. But that may change soon.