Integrating Your Wistia Video With a MailChimp Email Campaign

MailChimp is our favorite email marketing system. When we need to send an email to our wonderful customers, and don't want it to get stuck in spam filters, we use MailChimp.

They also provide some pretty neat tools for discovering how your email marketing funnel works. For our Wistia users, we wanted to create a seamless experience where they could send tailored email campaigns that included Wistia videos, and then track how their contacts interacted with the video itself.

So let's dive in to how to create an integrated Wistia&MailChimp email campaign!

The first step is, of course, choosing the video you'd like to show off in your campaign.

I've chosen this neat video we did about sharing video outside of Wistia (check out the whole video here). Now that we've decided which video to share, navigate to the media viewing page of that video (where you can actually play the video inside your Wistia account).

Now that you've chosen the video, enter the video embed modal by either clicking the ”</> Embed” button under the video player, or by choosing “Embed” under the Media Actions drop-down menu.


In the Embed modal, open up the “For Email Marketing” tab. Choose “MailChimp” from the Email provider drop-down (it should be first, because we 'heart' them!). Then tweak your settings for thumbnail size (how big it will appear in the email) and landing page (once they click on the thumbnail, where should they go? - hint: where the video is!).

TIP: Our thumbnail default size of 450px is the same as MailChimp and looks great in most email software. If you'd like to test a different size, use “pop-up preview” in MailChimp after pasting in a revised Merge Tag.

NOTE: if you haven't set this as a “public” project, you will be prompted to do that before embedding. You need to be able to share the media by link in order to use email marketing.

After getting the thumbnail and link settings working the way you'd like, copy the “Video Merge Tag” code, and paste it into the body of your MailChimp email.

Tip: I normally send myself a test, to make sure everything is working correctly.

Once your viewers receive their emails, they will start clicking your video!
The great part about MailChimp and Wistia together is that the merge tag has your recipient's email address built in - so when tracking the stats you can see exactly which emails watched the video, and up to the second how much they watched. Now how cool is that? Make sure you check in the “Public and Embed Stats” for the viewing stats.

Tip: If you would like to keep the email campaign separate from the other embedded viewings of the video, set up a separate project specifically for the email version of the video.