The Creative Side

One question I have heard repeatedly over the years is “how can I use Flash in my email creative?” I even wrote a whitepaper on the subject a couple years ago that is still a popular download today.  The problem has always been the support from email clients to view Flash.  When it comes to email, the odds have always been stacked up against our friend the Flash player.  There has never been support for Flash from the online clients like Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail. Even Outlook had a problem with it if you didn’t have your security settings set a certain way.  The fix I used to always suggest and the premise of the whitepaper was to use a background image in a table cell as big as your Flash that would sit behind it in the code. Most subscribers that couldn’t see the Flash would instead see the background image.  That would be followed by a direct link to the Flash hosted out on the website.  Well, now with the complete lack of support for background images in Outlook 07 as well as no support for Flash, it’s time to wave the white flag and surrender.  My advice is, as much as I’d like to tell you there’s a good way to insert Flash into email, there just isn’t one.  We need to link to the Flash hosted out on a website instead of including it in an email. 

Get creative with your email HTML. If it’s Flash video you are attempting, you could have a still shot in a video player with the control buttons showing.  This would be an image in your email that links out to the Flash video on your site.  When subscribers click the play button, it will open there browser, go to that page and start to play. If you are an advanced Flash actionscripter, it is possible to pass personalization tags onto your Flash. See the “Using ASP to Pass Profiling Information in Email” portion of the whitepaper.

So, my best advice is to design your email in a creative way to entice your subscribers to click through to your Flash masterpiece.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 9:11 am and is filed under Email Layout, Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or use this trackback link from your own site: http://creative.blog.listrak.com/wp-trackback.php?p=16