Eyejot in The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal's Emily Steel mentioned Eyejot in her article Video Gets Entrée Into Email which was posted live today. The article primarily focused on Goodmail's recently announced product aimed at helping publishers get video players successfully placed and operational inside email messages.

This has long been a challenge for web-based email platforms. They have, for security and control reasons, intentionally stripped out HTML embed and object code, which is required to, for example, host a Flash player (or more nefarious playloads). So, the industry has reacted by either embedding static images that look like they're part of a movie and invite the reader to "click to view" or, more creatively, have utilized animated GIF images to expose some motion in the hopes of guaranteeing a "click to view."

The Goodmail solution is certainly interesting but it's primarily an agreement they've established with only a few ISPs. So their solution isn't universal. For us that's a problem. While it might be really cool to play video inside of an email message, unless it's a solution that can be used all the time, everywhere, it may ultimately be less effective than more traditional techniques.

Incidentally, Eyejot intends to offer an animated GIF option for its notification messages to PRO Plus members in the near future.

Comments

[Richard M. Smith]

Most email readers block image files by default nowadays. I'm amazed how many Internet marketers don't seem to understand this simple fact of life and send out image-laden email messages which unreadable by most people.

Emails with videos in them seem even more problematic because enabling ActiveX controls in email messages is a really bad security policy.

[David Geller]

The Goodmail solution is supposed to prevent malicious payloads from being exposed through email and their model is predicated on wrapping a standard Adobe Flash video player and utilizing a cryptographically signed signature that their partner ISPs sites can use to guarantee that only sanctioned content is exposed.

It's a good idea but they have too few ISP partners and the one's they do have represent a declining user base among our users.

In terms of many mail clients blocking images by default, that's certainly true. But, users that receive regular emails (even marketing emails) from companies they know and recognize will probably allow (and enable) images from them to be displayed.

In those scenarios, the use of animated GIFs to entice click-to-view video engagement has been shown to be successful.

Eyejot's position will be to allow PRO Plus (business oriented) users to enable animated GIFs to be generated in their notification emails. It will be optional and we will encourage our users to test to see whether this practice helps or hinders in terms of open, view and engagement levels.

[DominicT]

Yes, I completely agree with Richard, getting people to see the images on emails itself is difficult, videos will be impossible.

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[Carmen T]

Hi Richard,

You are right. It is the 'email client" that seems to dictate the user's preferences, rather than the other way round. Be it a desktop based email client such as MS Outlook or a web-based ESP such as Hotmail or Gmail, images are blocked by default. Of course they claim to do it all for our "safety". While this may also be true to some extent, it messes the emails of legit email marketers who and only flashy HTML emails!To be honest it is pretty irritating to click to display the images of each and every HTML email you receive!

Thankfully I never do that. I always send text-only message. If needed, I upload the HTML version of the newsletter on my server and then link to it in my email.