MailChimp Email Marketing Blog » bliptv http://www.mailchimp.com/blog MailChimp, email marketing, and monkeys! Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:57:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Linking to YouTube, Blip.tv and Vimeo in MailChimp http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/linking-to-youtube-blip-tv-and-vimeo-in-mailchimp/ http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/linking-to-youtube-blip-tv-and-vimeo-in-mailchimp/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:10:08 +0000 Amanda http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/?p=5128 thm_youtubemergeEverybody wants to embed videos into their HTML emails. The sad truth is they break more often than not. There are promising developments here and there (and Mark Brownlow has a great roundup here).

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.

It’s a miserable process that we just made easier with our YouTube (and Blip.tv and Vimeo) merge tag…

If you want to include a video in your MailChimp campaign, and it’s hosted on YouTube, Blip.tv or Vimeo, just get the video ID, and stick it in our new video merge tag like this:

MailChimp will go to the video, grab its keyframe (a still image from your video), then overlay some video control elements to make it look playable:

keyboardcat

Whenever users click, it’ll take them to the hosted version of your video.

No need to screenshot anything, upload to MailChimp, etc. Just use the merge tag, and you’re done.

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