I’m using the Bubble native “send email” workflow. Can I accomplish this with the native functionality? Or do I need a new email plugin (like the CoPilot SendGrid plugin)?
FYI, you aren’t going to get very good results embedding the video in an email.
The support just isn’t there and by the sounds of it, you don’t have the knowledge to know how to hide the video in email clients that don’t support video.
You’re better off creating an image with a play button overlaid and then link the image to your Loom video.
A step above that would be to create an animated Gif with a few frames from the video and link to the Loom video.
Images are supported everywhere and you don’t need to try and do anything hacky.
+1 on this, but if you want to have a video just like how Emmanuel sent out that one marketing email via Mailchimp toward the end of last year, then you’d need to use an HTML template with either Sendgrid or another email API, I like Postmark
In the first I’ve got a gigantic image with a Loom link. The last part of the email is hidden by the three dots.
In the second, I’ve set image container dimensions and kept the Loom URL. The entire message is hidden.
In the third, I kept the image and image dimensions the same but changed to a YouTube URL. The message displays in its entirety as I’d like.
Realize this is a bit of a departure from the original question but I’ve check out some of your other posts and you seem to be an email guru so I’m wondering: do you have any ideas about what causes these three dots to sometimes appear and how to avoid them?
Thanks, @johnny! I may give that a try in the future.
Niven mentions “you don’t have the knowledge to know how to hide the video in email clients that don’t support video”
I assumed all email clients support HTML these days and the video would be delivered by HTML… do you know when this wouldn’t work? Certain email clients?
Also, the Bubble Reference docs on the Send Email action make no mention of plain text or html. Based on my experience and your reply I’m guessing this action is strictly plain text only… do you know for sure?
Yes, I’m pretty positive unless you use a Sendgrid Template for all your emails which can be achieved by setting a domain name and using your own Sendgrid account. However, I don’t think that gives you the ability to pass HTML into the template, I think it lets you pass BB code
First off, I just wanted to apologise for something I said/my tone in my original response, specifically this:
I hope this didn’t come across too brash or rude. I should have proofed this response beforehand and reworded it. I was simply pointing to the fact most people don’t have the more advanced knowledge of showing/hiding things in specific email clients, I wasn’t specifically calling you out.
Sounds like you didn’t take it the wrong way but I just want to make sure there wasn’t any ill feeling there
If I did cause any offense, I apologise.
Back to your issue!
So what you’re experiencing here is the Gmail conversation view issue. You may know about this, but just in case → Gmail has a conversation mode to join up multiple emails which are effectively a ‘conversation’, into one thread for easy reading and finding of previous emails.
Always best to avoid testing using the conversation view as it’ll cause all kinds of havoc and shouldn’t be relied on for testing.
What I would do if sending multiple tests is to change the subject line every time, say by adding a number at the end and increasing each time. This way you avoid Gmail joining your tests up.
e.g. test email 1
test email 2
test email 3
…
Alternatively, you could turn off conversation mode in the settings temporarily, until done testing.
You’re completely correct here. They absolutely do. However, each email client (Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, etc), have their own rendering engines. So HTML & CSS support differs (a lot!) between them.
On top of that, you’ll also find rendering engines differ between operating systems and even operating system versions.
e.g.
So at one point Apple Mail supported embedded video.
As far as I’m aware, it doesn’t anymore, or has varying support depending on the the app version and OS version.
So, in the industry we will typically will either go all in and research/test which will support embedded video and code it in and then have specific code that will test for embedded video support and then display the video and a fall back if the test fails - to display the linked image I mentioned in my original response…
OR
In the interests of time and effort, we’ll simply go for a linked image for all email clients.
I prefer this second option as support is universal and the effort to test for embedded video is just over the top and an update could be pushed at any time by an email client so you could send your embedded video but by the time the subscriber actually opens the email which could be days in the future, an update has rolled out and support for video is gone or has changed in some form. So a waste of time in the end.
No worries. I don’t mind straight to the point and this is accurate:
Thanks for the explanations of conversation view and html / embedded video support. I’ll stick to linked video. You’ve convinced me that embedded video is more hassle than its worth.
