A new report by Reel SEO highlights an overlooked corner in the HTML5 v Adobe Flash standards war: video email marketers and the impact the advent of HTML5 will have on them.

Unlike other advertisers who may be bemoaning Apple's refusal to support the ubiquitous technology, email marketers may be better off with HTML5, Reel SEO concludes.

Up until recently email marketers have had to rely on using a link to a video from a static image within an email message to a landing page containing a video player. The reason for this, it explains, is that most email clients strip Javascript and Flash embeds due to security concerns. "HTML5 video, on the other hand, is built directly into supporting mail clients/browsers, making security a non-issue."

Growing Numbers

A separate study from GetResponse Email Marketing suggests that demand for more effective video email marketing technologies is on the upswing. In a survey of SMB marketers, more than 80% said they plan to use video emails in 2010. Founder of GetResponse, Simon Grabowski notes that according to the firm's 2009 study, video emails delivered close to a 100% increase in click through rates.

Limited Impact

Aside from firms interested specifically in targeting email marketing video messages to iPad and iPhone users, though, the advance of HTML5 is likely to provide only a minimal boost to these companies in the near term. The only other way email marketers can currently deliver full motion video with audio in email is by using Goodmail's CertifiedVideo service, Reel SEO notes. It enables video embeds for email recipients that use AOL as an Internet Service Provider.

"Unless the other mail clients are somehow accounted for overall video penetration and proper rendering across an entire audience will remain a challenge for marketers," it said. "Even today, all major webmail clients will strip the HTML5 video tag - even in HTML5 compliant browsers."

The .GIF Alternative

For the foreseeable future email marketers are going to have to continue to rely on delivering video through an animated .GIF.

A repurposed web 1.0 technology, GIFs - or Graphics Interchange Format - can work as a substitute, according to Jordan Lane, at Email Responsibly, a website managed by Experian CheetahMail.

It is a stable alternative for a format that, while promising, is still in early days with glitch-prone technology and oftentimes surprising additional costs. There are disadvantages to using animated GIFs as a substitute for true video, on the other hand, starting with lack of player control and the fact that some browsers and email applications process the animation differently.

If marketers do opt for animated GIFs, Lane suggests the following:

• Make the animation the focal point of the email so subscribers interact with the video - not pass over it.

• Make sure the first and last frames of the video look particularly good because only the first frame of an Animated GIF will display in Outlook 2007 and if the video is not set to loop infinitely, the last frame of the video will be the "last frame standing" once the animation completes.

• Keep the size of the animated GIF to a minimum. Reducing the number of colors per frame from 256 to 128 can decrease the size of a video GIF by a quarter without noticeably impacting output quality.