Email marketing campaigns are great for engaging your prospects with timely messages. When done right, they can be an excellent driver of business value.

Adding media to the mix is an effective way to increase click-through rates and maximize engagement with your message. Wistia makes it easy to integrate media with your email marketing campaigns, as well as measure the results down to the individual viewer, second-by-second.

After this tutorial, you will be able to integrate media into your email marketing campaigns and understand which recipients are engaged with your message.

Wistia's email embeds offer a powerful way to integrate video content into your email marketing strategy and increase click-through rates. These embeds add a clickable thumbnail image to your email body that directs recipients to a dedicated page to view your video.

With Wistia's dynamic email tagging, email embed links can automatically collect recipient emails when they engage with your content, allowing you to identify your audience and measure the results.

The real magic of email marketing embeds is the ability to identify which recipients are engaging with your video content through dynamic email tagging. This is a great way to take contacts already collected in your email lists and have them identified in your Wistia stats.

The dynamic part is the use of platform-specific placeholders, which your email platform will replace with the recipient's email automatically upon sending. When your recipients click the video thumbnail, their email is passed to the Wistia player using embed code ID tagging, so that viewer's activity is logged with their email address in your Wistia stats.

This process happens seamlessly in the background, giving you valuable insights into who's watching your videos without requiring any extra effort from the leads you've already collected in your email list.

When using an email embed, you’ll be adding a thumbnail image which links to the video. The thumbnail will include a play button in the image to indicate that it’s a video link, matching the color you select for the video player.

In the Embed modal for your desired video, select the "Email" tab and choose your provider from the drop-down list.

These embeds use platform-specific “merge tags” for dynamic email tagging. Your email platform will take care of populating the recipient emails for collection in your Wistia stats. Check out our Integrations page for the full list of email providers.

After you choose your email provider, customize the settings for your campaign.

"Thumbnail Size" refers to the size of the thumbnail image in your email. 450px is our standard width, but you can change it as you see fit.

"Links to" is where people will end up after clicking the thumbnail image. By default, it’s a public link to the media in your Wistia account. If you want to direct them to a publicly accessible landing page where your video is embedded instead, just change the link here.

"Autoplay Media" determines whether the video is set play automatically when viewers arrive on the page. This is subject to the specific browser settings for each viewer, as with all autoplay settings.

Once you’ve got your settings dialed in, copy the video merge tag and paste it into the HTML editor for your email provider. It may show up as just the merge tag - try the preview mode in your email campaign provider to see how it displays. When you are satisfied, send it out to your loving audience!

Voila! The thumbnail image will appear in your email, linked to the page you specified with your video. In the background, we’ll be collecting stats on which viewers in your list viewed the video (available in the media engagement analytics and account view stream).

More on that here: Dynamic link tracking results.

Wistia provides a good smattering of email merge tags right within the app. But if you’d like to construct your own, read on!

As mentioned above, the video that you wish people to view needs to be viewable at a publicly accessible web page. To do this, you will need to upload your media to your Wistia account. You'll be able to create a dynamic link using the media page in Wistia or a page on your website where the video is embedded.

Wistia attaches views of your media on your website to individual email addresses through the use of a special hyperlink called a dynamic link. Dynamic links use the mail merge capabilities of your email marketing provider to create a personalized URL for every person in your mailing list.

The dynamic link we make here should be input into your email marketing tool to create the link that your users will click on to view your media. Then we can start tracking!

First, start with the URL of the media page or the page where you embedded your media. As an example, let’s say your media was embedded on the following page:

Next, add a query string parameter to the URL in which the user’s email will be passed. In this case, add ?wemail=:

If the URL where your media was embedded already contains a query string, i.e.:

Then simply add an ampersand before the wemail=:

The final step to finish the dynamic link is to add the email merge tag from your email marketing tool. A merge tag is a special character that your email marketing client uses to personalize your email for each individual recipient.

It is necessary to find out:

We have compiled a growing list of email marketing tools, and we’ve created a table of what the URL email merge tag is for that tool.

Let’s assume, for example, that we are using Emma as our email marketing tool. The URL email merge tag for Emma is: [[email]].

To complete the dynamic link, we simply append this URL email merge tag to the end of the link created in Step #2. The result is:

This is the link that can be used in your email marketing campaign. Your finished link in HTML might look something like the following:

When someone clicks the dynamic link in your email campaign, they will be taken to the page containing the media. Wistia will capture the user’s email address and associate it with that person’s viewing session on your website.

When you view the analytics for your media, you’ll see stats for each person who clicked through from your email campaign, as shown in the following example:

You can see this data in the account's View Stream, too!

Additionally, this data can also be exported to a spreadsheet using the export to CSV feature on the media's Engagement page, or via Wistia’s Stats API, to help you more easily sort through large data sets.

This true read on individual viewer engagement helps you identify your most interested viewers. From there, you can score your leads, track future communications with pin-pointed precision, and calculate the ROI of your campaigns.

The table below includes our known list of email clients that support dynamic links and the merge tags needed to take advantage of them. Some of these clients are included in the embed modal in Wistia, and some can be utilized via a custom dynamic link.

Here’s how to use dynamic merge tags with SendGrid:

So if your recipient list looked like this:

You can now write a link like:

And that would be dynamically replaced to:

If you have a Turnstile on your video, you can connect it to a list in your email marketing provider so viewers will be added to the list once they submit the form.

If you have a Turnstile enabled on your video, it will automatically be disabled for viewers who click the dynamic link in your email campaign. This way, your viewers don’t need to fill out a form when they’ve already been identified by the link.