Adding a Video to your Email

How to add a video link to your emails

Felix Higgs avatar
Written by Felix Higgs
Updated over a week ago

Email is moving away from static content, the use of animated gifs, videos and dynamic images among other things is on the rise.

Embedding a full video within an email is not practical at the moment as the email file size would be too large and you would run into deliverability issues.

The most common solution is to host your video somewhere else and just have a screenshot of a frame of the video in your email with a play icon overlaid on top.

 How to add a video to a Knak email

  • Load your video to a hosting site like Youtube, Vimeo or Vidyard.

  • Take a screenshot of a frame of the video that you want to display in your email

  • Load the image into your Knak image library and then load the image into your email as a row background image. If you're not sure how to do that, check out this article

  • Drag in an image content box over the top of your background image and load a play icon into the image box.

  • Your play icon could look like this:

  • Here is the icon on top of that background image.

  • You can use padding to move the play icon into the right spot on top of the background image.

  • Finally, add an image link to the play icon so that when it's clicked the viewer is taken back to the video hosting site to view your video.

  • Consider ticking 'highlight on hover' to make the play icon change color when hovered over to really highlight the CTA!


Pro Tip - You don't have to always link to the start of a video, sometimes you might want to link to a certain part halfway through a longer video. Both Youtube and Vimeo allow you to do that by adding minute and second url parameters to the end of the video URL.
For YouTube, play your video to the part you want to link to, hit pause and then right click. You tube will automatically generate a url to the right place in the video.

For Vimeo, just add #t=1m2s to the end if your video link. That would start the video at 1 minute & 2 seconds.  https://vimeo.com/81400335#t=1m2s

Need more help? Contact support via live chat within Knak using the chat bubble in the bottom right corner or email support@knak.com

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