Ok, let’s get this sorted quickly. The answer is simply no. Online video has been the new kid on the marketing block for quite some time, with companies big and small jumping in with some form of video marketing.
Recently, Goodmail, a third-party reputation services provider (RSP), was talking about allowing email marketers to deliver their email with embedded video, for a price. Sounds like a cool idea but I don’t know if that is going to work, unless they can convince not only the email clients and web-based email developers, but also the anti-virus, anti-spam and a load of other security developers to accept these embedded codes in email. For now, it looks more like a dream to me, but hey, with the WWW, you never know.
But back to me saying “No video”. That doesn’t mean you can’t be creative with your newsletters. I’ve seen newsletters that have included a screenshot of a video that is linked to the actual video, so when recipients click on the screenshot, it will open up their browser and load the video. Smart move!
You could go further by animating a few frames from the actual video and saving it as a GIF animation (watch your file size though). This would give your recipients a brief (and I really mean brief) preview of the video. But it’s enough to do the job.