19 Comments

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  Jamie says:

  Love the video integration…how do you think this will work for your business customers given Vimeo’s stance on removing commercial video content?

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    Ben says:

    Hi Jamie, I’ve personally been shut down by Vimeo, and can attest to the fact that it’s not a fun process. It’s their prerogative though. And we now gladly pay for Blip.tv’s corporate account. In terms of our customers, they are sending commercial email, but they’re not always embedding commercial videos. Sometimes they just want to post something entertaining that they saw on vimeo.

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  Dwayne says:

  Looks great! Are the merge tags hidden somewhere special? I don’t see them anywhere.

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  Ben says:

  This feature looks great, but I’m wondering if there’s any way to have the video link to a page on our site instead of on Youtube, Vimeo, or blip.

  In our use case, we embed all of our Youtube and Blip videos on our own site because we want to drive people back to our site.

  So we want to use the video ID to generate the video thumbnail with the “player” around it, but we want to be able to specify a custom URL to link the image to. Any way to do this with the current tags?

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  Dwayne says:

  Ben,
  Right from the article:

  “But the fact of the matter is the safest thing you can do is generate a screenshot of your YouTube video player, insert that image into your email, then link it to your actual video landing page.”

  So you make a screenshot of the video and link it to your site.

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  Ben says:

  Dwayne,

  Thanks for the reply, but I’m hoping to do this without all of that manual work. As I understand it, the whole idea of the Mailchimp video merge tag is that you specifically wouldn’t have to manually create the image.

  So what I’m asking is if there’s a way to specify a custom URL for use with the Mailchimp video merge tag.

  –Ben

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  Justin says:

  Speaking of video Ben, can I ask what screencast application you guys use to capture those cool multi-angle shots for your tutorial videos?

  Or are you somehow adding those effects in post?

  Cheers,

  Justin

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  • 

    Ben says:

    Screenflow + After Effects.

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  Justin says:

  Thanks Ben. I’m really impressed with your tutorials. I’m working on a number of them for my company as well. It looks like I will need to spend some time with After Effects so we can inject a bit more “wow” into our videos as you guys have done. Keep up the great work!

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  daniel says:

  wow! very slick, indeed.

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  Justin says:

  Now if we could just take what you guys developed and make it something like this

  *|VIDEO:(url)|* and it pulls the screenshot and links to the URL.

  Does it have to be a specific file type like FLV which i believe all those sites above are. This would be what Ben is looking for. Also it would be very beneficial for me too as i would prefer the customer going to our website vs one of the video sites. The page can be more tailored then too.

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  Ben says:

  Yes, what Justin is suggesting would be really helpful. I’d just modify the merge tag to be in the following format:

  *|YOUTUBE:[VIDEOID]:[URL]|*

  Thus, you would be able to specify both the YouTube (or Vimeo/Blip) Video ID, as well as a destination page. If someone didn’t specify a destination URL and used the merge tag currently as is, it would point to the YouTube hosted page.

  Ben, does this seem feasible? Would this be difficult to program?

  –The Other Ben

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  • 

    Jesse says:

    If you really feel you need to send people to an alternate link, there’s a manual way to do that, though you may draw the ire of some subscribers who may believe you are mis-leading them.

    1) Insert the proper video merge tag
    2) Load the Campaign Preview – this will generate the preview/player image and store it in your (free) Image Gallery
    3) Remove the video tag
    4) Insert the image and size/link/style/etc it however you’d like

    Of course once it’s been generated once, there’s no need to generate it again if you need to reuse it. We’ll consider an option to allow automating that in the future, but don’t hold your breath for too long….

    Also, because of the way we generate these preview images, we can’t currently just support any generic video service or file type – support for specific providers has to be manually tailored for each.

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  Justin says:

  I cant see all the comments. As there was a follow up to my comment.

  When i said *|VIDEO:(url)|* – The video would tell mailchimp hey its a video lets run the script to do the screenshots. The url is the page the video is on. My thought is i would host the video on my server.

  One thought better. *|VIDEO:(url),User:Pass|* to allow the user and mailchimp to be able to get into a protected video section. Sneak peaks that you dont want open to the public via Youtube or other sites.

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  • 

    mahalie says:

    Offering automated screen-grab and skinning for 3 known content providers is entirely different than trying to automate the extraction of video on anyone’s website coded in any way possible.

    How would the script even know where the video is? It could be an object tag, could be a div or tag that uses jQuery to pop in video, or one of a million other ways. There would be no way for them to know what is a regular flash file for site features (such as ads or nav) and what is a video. Really, it’s just a crazy request!

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  Karl says:

  Would be great to also have this capability for Smugmug…

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  • 

    darin says:

    yes, a 2nd request for smugmug.

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