I wanted to watch the video. I really did. But I couldn’t find the link to the video in the email. To get the most benefit from your emails, you need to make your links prominent.

Color and underline

My online experiences have conditioned me to click on links that are underlined, with text colored blue. Here’s a sample of what I mean: Email Writing.

Instead, I saw text in a color only slightly different from the rest of the email. Plus, that text wasn’t underlined. It looked something like the following:

click to view video

The text saying “click to view video” was a link. Do you see why I was confused? I thought the sender forgot to insert the link. Simply underlining the link text probably would be enough to communicate the link to me. Increasing the color contrast between the link text and the other text would also have helped.

Another option: Embed video

You can embed videos in most e-newsletters. For example, here are Constant Contact’s instructions on how to embed video. Then I would have seen something like what you see below.

I imagine that some e-newsletter senders skip video embedding because they want to track how many people click on each link in their e-newsletters. I have a solution for them. You can provide a visual cue that also involves a trackable e-newsletter link. Here’s what you do:

1. Take a screenshot of your video.
2. Insert the screenshot into your e-newsletter as clickable link leading to the video.
3. Add a caption to the image in your e-newsletter. Something like, “Click on this image to reach the video.”

I imagine it would look something like what you see below.

 

 

Your thoughts?

If you link to video in your e-newsletters, I’m interested in learning how you make it work for you. Please comment.