Although that may sound like an easy and straightforward way to send videos, it is actually anything but – and there are several issues that you’re going to face.
Email Attachment File Size Limitations
Technically email attachments can be any size, but in practice there are limitations put in place by mail servers. The exact limitation varies from server to server but typically it is in the region of 10MB to 25MB.
That limitation is applied both to sending and receiving attachments. For example your mail server may allow you to send a 25MB attachment, but if the recipient is using a server that only allows 10MB attachments – it will be rejected.
To further compound the issue if you’re sending out an email to users on different mail services it may hop through several mail servers along the way – each of which could have different file size limitations for attachments.
How to Reduce the File Size of Marketing Videos
Assuming you are set on adding a marketing video to an email as an attachment, the goal should be to keep it as small as possible. If you’re sharing the same email service as the recipient you can base it on the limitation of that service, but if not you should try to keep it below 10MB to be safe.
That can be tricky, but there are a few steps that you can take:
- Trim out any unnecessary parts of the video. The marketing video that you send should be as short as possible, so get rid of any parts that aren’t needed.
- Transcode the video to a format with better compression rates. Typically videos are encoded in H.264 which is decent, but assuming the recipient’s device is compatible
- Reduce the bitrate to get the file size as low as necessary. The quality of your marketing video will be affected and compression artifacts will appear, but it is the only reliable way to get it within the file size limitation.
For the steps above to have a reasonable chance of success, your marketing video must be short – ideally about 10 to 20 seconds, and definitely not more than 1 minute. Additionally you’ll need a video converter, and for example you could use Movavi Video Converter (www.movavi.com/videoconverter/).
Results will vary from video to video however, and in some you may find that the quality deteriorates too much as you reduce the bitrate.
Final Words
As you can see although you now know how to reduce the file size of your marketing videos so you can send them as email attachments – it is still risky, and in many cases may still be rejected. It would be safer to instead upload videos to cloud storage and share the link via email, or use other platforms that allow you to share videos.
