Email servers typically are not fond of video and many servers tend to block videos that have been embedded in the content of a mailing. In addition to the dip in overall delivery rates because of this, embedding video in your email makes it nearly impossible to track who has watched it. To address this, we created the Video block in our legacy* editor. So while you can’t embed a video into an email, when using a legacy* campaign or template, you can use the Video block to feature a link to a YouTube or Vimeo video in a similar fashion.

This article is for the Video block found in the legacy* editor. For information about the Video block in the drag and drop editor, please refer to this article.

How to add a Video block to a legacy* campaign

1. Navigate to your Campaigns tab.
2. Open a saved legacy* draft or click on the Create new campaign button to choose a legacy* template.
3. Click on the Video block icon in the left panel and drag it over to your mailing.
4. As you drag the block over to your campaign, you will see yellow sections appear labeled Drop here. These yellow drop spots will turn green as you hover over them, so you know where the content block will appear in the mailing.
5. Once you release the block, it will appear in the place you designated.
6. In the pop-up window that appears, enter the URL for a YouTube or Vimeo video. You should use a direct link to the video, with nothing added or shortened.
7. In the Alternate text field, enter a brief description of the video. Similar to images, the alternate text is what screen readers will read and is also what will display if images are turned off in a recipient’s inbox.
8. Use the Size dropdown menu to adjust the video’s size, if desired.
9. Use the Padding tool to adjust the video’s padding, if desired.
10. Click on the Insert video button.

How to add other video links to your campaign

When using the legacy* editor, you can still include links to videos that aren’t hosted on YouTube or Vimeo in your mailings, but you won’t use the Video block to do so. Instead, you would need to upload the video file to your document library and then link to it in your mailing. For more information about the file types accepted by the document library, please refer to this article.

Important notes about videos in legacy* mailings

The thumbnail that’s featured in the Video block is generated from the information that YouTube and Vimeo send us. As a result, there isn’t a way to determine what the thumbnail should be without logging into the YouTube or Vimeo account that owns the video and selecting a different image from there. However, if you’d like to use something different, you can add an image of your video by playing the video, taking a screenshot of the still image that you’d like to display, inserting that screenshot into your campaign as an image, and adding a link to the video behind that image.

Although any video that you add using the Video block will appear with a play button on an image, the video will not play in the actual email. Instead, clicking the play button will link the recipient to the YouTube or Vimeo URL. This is because trying to embed a video can make the email too heavy and many servers will block these types of files from coming through, which can negatively affect your delivery rate.

Are you getting an error that the video thumbnail can’t be generated? Try clearing your browser’s cache and cookies, shutting down your browser, and restarting it.

It’s always a good practice to check your response summary after you’ve sent out a new campaign, so that you can think about the most appropriate way to follow up with your video viewers. You might create a new audience segment for those who clicked to view the video and share more video content with those folks in the future.

Even though Vimeo videos can be set to unlisted, as long as the embed settings are set to embed “anywhere”, the video can still be added to the Video block. However, if the video’s embed settings are instead set to “nowhere”, you will not be able to add it to the Video block.

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* In April 2022, our legacy editor was replaced with a new drag and drop editor. Accounts that existed prior to this change still have access to the legacy editor through their previously saved templates and campaigns, however new, from-scratch campaigns can only be created in the new drag and drop editor. Accounts that were created after this change only have access to the new drag and drop editor. Please refer to our new editor FAQ article for more information.