We all know how powerful video can be be for presenting your products or services online. The popularity and growth of online video has been covered plenty of times before. Getting your video in front of the intended audience has always taken a little imagination, especially when it comes to promotion via email.

Email clients have always lagged behind in supporting new web functionality and much of this is down to minimizing virus attacks from attachments or scripts running in hidden code. This has meant that up until now there has been very little if any support for the direct display of video in an email.

The code required to embed a video in the body of an email just wouldn’t work in most cases. Instead you would have an image representing the video and linking through to it either on your web site or somewhere like YouTube.

Thanks to Google if you’re using video for marketing your products or brand you can now get better exposure directly in the email. Now when you send an email containing a link to a YouTube video any GoogleMail recipients will see, and more importantly be able to play, the video directly in the body of the email.

This should lead to more effective video marketing with increased conversion rates and we will be montitoring this over the coming months to see exactly what the results are. Currently this just works for YouTube videos in GoogleMail but you can be sure Yahoo and Hotmail will follow soon.