Video Email about our Heroes At Home

Video email. We have heard about it. We have blogged about it. We have even forum discussions about it. Experts tell us to nab a screen shot of the video and drive the user to view it on a web page. Rendering nightmares, inconsistent framing and a giant mess when it displays in the inbox. Well not anymore folks, today I received a pretty incredible email from Sears.

First and foremost, the email had nothing to do with trying to sell me something. For the last several weeks and the in the coming weeks we are getting inundated almost daily (and sometimes twice a day) with emails from almost every single eTailer on the planet about buying their stuff. No, this email had nothing to do with selling me anything. Its only purpose was to tell me about the Heroes At Home program from Sears and asking me to make a contribution. Pretty cool if you ask me.

What makes this email even more amazing is that it had a 20 second or so full motion video embedded into the email. It rendered in both Firefox and IE and every seed email client I have. I know this, because I was a part of the testing of this technology at Sears. ****FULL DISCLOSURE HERE**** I work for SHC in their email marketing group and was able to speak to the VP of Sales for VHD and test this technology before the email went out. To be honest, even if I didn’t work for SHC and I received this email, I would blog about it given its purpose and its technology within the email. I am not making this post for any shameless plug for my organization. I am making this post, because this email is truly cutting edge and because of its message.

Below you will see a screen shot of the email, but it does not do it justice in anyway. I encourage you to check out the web version here. Trust me folks, you need to see and check it out. Then when you are done watching it, please donate if you can to the HAH fund and/or check out the technology behind this email from VHD Technology.

Again to see the full motion video in the web version see it here. If for some reason you don’t believe me that this did play in the email client, I encourage you to email me at theemailzoo@gmail.com and I will be sure to get you a copy of this email.

I welcome your thoughts.

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