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Adding video to your email

Guillermo Padilla
  • Updated

This article applies to the Email builder in all plans.

An Easy Way to Add Content from YouTube or Vimeo

The video content block allows you to share your video content in an easy way in your emails. You only need to copy and paste the URL of your video from YouTube or Vimeo. Beefree will do the rest: it will grab the cover image for the video, overlay a play icon on top of it, and link it to the video content.

How it Works

You will find a Video tile in the Content panel. Drag it into your design to get started.

The Content properties section will ask you to provide a video URL from YouTube or Vimeo. These are the popular video hosting services that we currently support.

Beefree is compatible with the following privacy settings:

  • Youtube - Public and Unlisted
  • Vimeo - Public, Unlisted

The builder supports the following aspect ratios for videos:

  • 4:3 and 16:9 (standard video formats)
  • 9:16 (YouTube shorts format)
  • 21:9 and 9:21 (CinemaScope formats)

If you're using a YouTube video, you can also link the video starting at a specific timestamp. If you need information on how to generate this type of link, please see this Lifewire article. 

 

Once you insert a valid URL, the content block will display the cover image with a play icon overlayed on top of it. You can edit the type, color, and size of the play icon to change the way it looks.
 
Note that the builder can't access password-protected videos to get the cover image. 

 

Select the icon type that fits your design:

Choose the color that looks best with your cover image:

Pick a size. You're all done! 

Notes about embedding video in email

This feature does not embed the actual video in the email designed with Beefree, but rather links to it intuitively.

Embedded videos in email, unfortunately, don't work very well. Many email clients do not support it. Apple has been "back and forth" on video support in iOS over the years (there are more details in this Email on Acid article).
 
Additionally, users tend to open emails on mobile devices. Viewing videos on a mobile device can cause substantial data usage. Not to mention they may experience a poor user experience due to data connection quality.
 
With everything considered, we believe we chose the approach delivering the best results.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. 

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Comments

6 comments

Date Votes
  • Bevis Tang
    Bevis Tang

    As both Youtube and Vimeo are blocked in China. It's great if Chinese video platform such as QQ and Youku can be added to the support list.

    1
  • R Davies
    R Davies

    Bee has added horrible black padding top and bottom of my video and I can't figure out how to get rid of it.
    Thank you.

    0
  • Guillermo Padilla
    Guillermo Padilla

    Hi R., the black padding is applied by YouTube.
    Our video block automatically tries to get the max quality image, which has no black padding. In some cases, it may happen that this format doesn't exist, so our system fallbacks to the standard format, which is safe because it is always provided, but in most cases, the black padding appears in the image.

    1
  • R Davies
    R Davies

    Thank you Guillermo.
    I got round it by using an image instead and linking the YouTube video to the image.
    YouTube doesn't add the padding in their web page, it only showed in the email on Bee.

    0
  • Guillermo Padilla
    Guillermo Padilla

    Hi R., thanks for sharing the workaround that you used.
    Unfortunately, the thumbnails are not generated by us but provided by YouTube.
    You can use an online service like https://youthumb.net to check it, we use the MAXRES value if available, if not, we use the STANDARD value.
    If your video returns a correct MAXRES value in this service, please, let us know.

    0
  • Dan Walker
    Dan Walker

    Unfortunately, the Youtube image does not show up in Outlook desktop, latest version. It does appear in Gmail.

    0

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