Video Newsletters: Why the Format Is Finally Worth Your Time
A video newsletter is an email that features video content as its primary or supporting format, either embedding a video thumbnail that links to hosted footage, or using animated GIFs and short clips to drive click-through to longer content. Done well, it combines the reach and ownership of email with the engagement rates that video consistently delivers across almost every channel.
The format has been technically possible for years. What has changed is the tooling, the audience expectation, and the commercial case for using it at scale.
Key Takeaways
- Video newsletters work because they combine the owned-channel reliability of email with the engagement pull of video, not because the format is novel.
- Most email clients still cannot play video inline, so the practical approach is a thumbnail image linked to hosted video, not embedded autoplay.
- The format performs across industries from professional services to regulated sectors, but execution requirements differ significantly by audience and context.
- Production quality matters less than consistency and relevance. A weekly 90-second talking-head video with a clear point outperforms a monthly polished production with nothing to say.
- Competitive intelligence on how others in your sector use email can sharpen your own video newsletter strategy before you commit significant resource to it.
In This Article
- Why Email and Video Make Sense Together
- What Actually Works Technically
- The Formats That Work in Practice
- How Regulated and Relationship-Driven Sectors Are Using It
- What I Have Seen Work and What Has Not
- Measuring Whether It Is Actually Working
- How to Build the Competitive Picture Before You Commit
- Getting Started Without Overcomplicating It
Why Email and Video Make Sense Together
Email is the most commercially reliable channel most businesses own. No algorithm controls delivery. No platform can change the rules on you overnight. The list belongs to you in a way that a social following never does.
Video, meanwhile, is the format that most audiences engage with most readily. Not because it is inherently superior to text, but because it is easier to consume passively, it carries tone and personality that written content struggles to replicate, and it tends to hold attention longer when the content is genuinely useful.
Combining them sounds obvious. The reason it took so long to become a mainstream tactic is partly technical and partly cultural. Email clients were inconsistent in how they handled video. Marketers defaulted to what they knew. And the production bar for video felt high enough that most teams simply did not prioritise it.
That calculus has shifted. Production costs have dropped. Audiences are more comfortable with less polished formats. And the tools for hosting, tracking, and integrating video into email workflows have matured considerably. If you are thinking about building out your email programme more broadly, the wider context around email marketing strategy and lifecycle thinking is worth understanding before you focus on any single format.
What Actually Works Technically
The gap between what marketers want to do and what email clients actually support is still significant. Native video playback in email, the kind where a video plays directly inside the inbox without any click-through, is only reliably supported in a small number of email clients. Apple Mail handles it reasonably well. Most others do not.
The practical workaround that most experienced email marketers use is a static or animated thumbnail image linked to a hosted video page. The thumbnail looks like a video player. It carries a play button overlay. When the reader clicks, they land on a page where the video plays. This approach works across virtually every email client, gives you full tracking on click-through and view behaviour, and lets you host the video on a platform where you can measure engagement properly.
Vidyard has written usefully about how to structure video content for email contexts, including scripting approaches that account for the fact that viewers arriving from email are often in a different mindset to those discovering content organically. It is worth reading if you are setting up a video email programme from scratch.
Animated GIFs sit somewhere in the middle. They play automatically in most clients, require no click-through, and can convey a short sequence or a teaser effectively. The limitation is file size. A GIF that is too heavy will slow load times and may be blocked entirely. Keep them short, keep them compressed, and use them to tease rather than to deliver the full content.
The Formats That Work in Practice
There is no single video newsletter format. The right approach depends on your audience, your content strategy, and how much production resource you can sustain consistently. Consistency matters more than any individual execution.
The formats I have seen work reliably across different sectors include:
The talking-head update. A founder, expert, or team member speaking directly to the audience about something relevant. No studio required. A decent camera, reasonable audio, and a clear point to make. This format works because it is personal. The audience sees a face. They hear a voice. It builds familiarity in a way that text alone rarely does.
The explainer or tutorial. A short video that teaches something specific. This format suits professional services, technical products, and any business where demonstrating expertise is part of the commercial proposition. An architecture firm using email to stay front of mind with developers and clients could use this format to walk through a design decision or explain a planning consideration. That kind of application is explored in more depth in this piece on architecture email marketing.
The curated roundup with video commentary. A text-led newsletter that includes a short video commentary from the author or editor. The video adds a layer of perspective and personality to content that might otherwise feel like a link dump. This format is low production overhead and high on differentiation.
The product or service showcase. Video that demonstrates something in a way that static images cannot. This is particularly effective for physical products, spaces, or anything where the experience of seeing it in motion changes the perception. A wall art business, for example, can show a piece in a real room context in a way that a product shot cannot fully replicate. The specific dynamics of email for creative product businesses are covered in this article on email marketing strategies for wall art business promotion.
How Regulated and Relationship-Driven Sectors Are Using It
One of the more interesting developments in email marketing over the past few years is the adoption of video newsletters in sectors that were historically conservative about format experimentation. Financial services, healthcare, real estate, and specialist retail have all started using video in email in ways that would have seemed unlikely a decade ago.
In real estate, video newsletters are being used to nurture leads through long consideration cycles. A short walkthrough video embedded in a monthly newsletter keeps a potential buyer or tenant engaged during a period when they are not yet ready to transact. The relationship stays warm. The agent or developer stays visible. The specific mechanics of this approach are covered in more detail in this piece on real estate lead nurturing.
Credit unions are another example worth noting. They operate in a trust-sensitive environment where personality and human connection carry real commercial weight. A short video from a branch manager or financial advisor explaining a product change or a market development does something that a text email cannot: it makes the institution feel less institutional. The broader email context for this sector is worth understanding, and this article on credit union email marketing covers the strategic considerations in detail.
Dispensaries and cannabis retail businesses face a different set of constraints. Platform advertising restrictions make owned channels like email disproportionately important. Video newsletters in this sector tend to focus on education, product knowledge, and community building rather than direct promotion. The regulatory environment shapes the content strategy significantly. More on that in this piece on dispensary email marketing.
What I Have Seen Work and What Has Not
When I was at iProspect, growing the agency from around 20 people to over 100, one of the consistent challenges was staying visible and credible with clients during periods when we were not actively pitching them. Email was part of that. Video in email was not something we used systematically at the time, but watching the results from clients who were experimenting with it gave me a clear view of where the format added genuine value and where it was theatre.
The video newsletters that worked had a point of view. They were not just updates or recaps. They offered something the reader could not easily get elsewhere. The ones that failed were usually produced with too much effort on the production side and too little on the editorial side. A beautifully shot video with nothing interesting to say is still a waste of the reader’s time.
Earlier in my career, I built a website from scratch because the MD would not approve budget for an agency to do it. I taught myself to code. The lesson from that experience was not about coding. It was about the value of understanding the medium yourself before you outsource it. The same principle applies to video newsletters. If you have never scripted and recorded a short video yourself, do it before you hire a production team. You will make better decisions about what to commission once you understand what the format actually requires.
Mailchimp has put together some useful resources on creating AI-assisted video content for email, which is worth reviewing if you are looking at ways to produce video at scale without a large production budget. The tools are more capable than most marketers realise.
Measuring Whether It Is Actually Working
The metrics that matter for a video newsletter are not fundamentally different from those that matter for any email programme. Open rate tells you whether your subject line and sender reputation are doing their job. Click-through rate tells you whether the content is compelling enough to act on. But video adds a layer of measurement that most email programmes do not have: video engagement data.
When someone clicks through from your email to a hosted video, you can track how much of the video they watched, where they dropped off, and whether they took any action after watching. That data is genuinely useful. A video where 80% of viewers drop off in the first 20 seconds is telling you something specific about either the opening or the audience match. A video where viewers watch to the end and then click through to a product page is telling you something equally specific about what is working.
Vidyard has published practical guidance on how video and email list growth interact, including how live video can be used to drive email sign-ups that then feed into a video newsletter programme. The relationship between video distribution channels and email list development is worth thinking about strategically, not just tactically.
One thing I would caution against is treating video view counts as a meaningful success metric in isolation. I have judged the Effie Awards and seen a significant number of campaigns where impressive-sounding video metrics masked flat or declining commercial performance. Views are not sales. Engagement is not revenue. Build your measurement framework around what the video newsletter is actually supposed to do for the business, and measure that.
How to Build the Competitive Picture Before You Commit
Before investing significantly in a video newsletter programme, it is worth understanding what your competitors are doing with email. Not to copy them, but to identify gaps and avoid producing something that is already saturating the inbox of your shared audience.
A structured approach to competitive email analysis can tell you what formats competitors are using, how frequently they send, what content themes they favour, and where there are clear white spaces in the market. This kind of intelligence is particularly valuable when you are deciding whether video is the right differentiator or whether the opportunity lies somewhere else entirely. This article on competitive email marketing analysis covers the methodology in detail.
The broader point is that format decisions should follow audience and competitive insight, not trend reports. Video newsletters are worth considering because the format has genuine commercial merit, not because they are currently receiving attention. Those are different reasons, and they lead to different quality of execution.
Moz has a useful perspective on what makes email newsletters work from an engagement and content standpoint that is worth reading alongside any format-specific thinking. The fundamentals of what makes a newsletter worth opening have not changed as much as the format discussion might suggest.
Getting Started Without Overcomplicating It
The most common mistake I see with video newsletter programmes is over-engineering the launch. Teams spend months on production workflows, brand guidelines for video, platform evaluation, and approval processes. By the time they send the first edition, the initial energy has dissipated and the programme feels like a compliance exercise rather than a genuine editorial commitment.
Start with one video. Record it yourself or with minimal production support. Send it to a segment of your list. Look at what happens to click-through rate compared to a standard edition. That single data point will tell you more about whether the format works for your audience than any amount of pre-launch planning.
When I launched a paid search campaign at lastminute.com for a music festival, we generated six figures of revenue within roughly a day from a campaign that was, in retrospect, fairly straightforward. The lesson was not that the campaign was clever. It was that speed of execution and willingness to test something before perfecting it consistently outperforms the alternative. The same logic applies here.
Mailchimp’s overview of what makes a newsletter work is a useful reference point for thinking about the structural and editorial foundations that any newsletter format needs to have in place before you add video to the mix. Get those right first.
The content marketing landscape for newsletters is also worth understanding in context. The Content Marketing Institute’s roundup of leading content newsletters gives a useful sense of the editorial standard that audiences are now accustomed to across professional and consumer contexts. It raises the bar, but it also shows what is possible with a clear editorial voice and consistent publishing cadence.
If you are building out a more comprehensive email programme and want to understand how video newsletters fit within the broader strategic picture, the resources on email marketing at The Marketing Juice cover lifecycle thinking, segmentation, and channel integration in ways that will help you position the format correctly within your overall approach.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
