How can you employ the use of sound in emails? Consider the following: Speak to your visually impaired subscribers They would greatly benefit from an audio file in their email instead of sending their subscribers to a different platform, which would drastically reduce conversions by distracting the reader. Because sound can give your email an edge, it can be a great way to drive reader engagement and keep your subscriber on your email longer.Ĭonsider our example of the musician above (or a podcaster) looking to send a sample of their latest project to their list as a marketing strategy. While the use of sound may not be a favorite strategy among many marketers, it does have its place in email marketing. It’s an interesting idea, but not one we’ll likely recommend implementing any time soon. You may be interested in how Facebook uses sound files to track their email campaigns. Historical tags like were deprecated because people strongly dislike having things play that they can’t control. It works, but a lack of player controls will cause nothing but grief and likely unsubscribes. With these email clients, you are assured of sending messages that are loud and clear-oh, and you can be certain that they will reach the inbox. So which email clients can you trust to deliver your email audio experience perfectly? Here are the 5 most common ones: If you do manage to get your audio file past your email client, chances are that it will not pass through the spam filter. Many email clients strip out any audio (and video) files from emails for security reasons, so you will definitely need to work your way around it. For both clients, your best bet is perhaps to feature a secondary fallback, such as a link to the file in the email copy, so subscribers have something other than the HTML5 audio content to work with. Likewise, we found that Postbox strips out the tags and content altogether, perhaps pre-empting the chaos that audio in email could bring. Sadly, the Safari browser doesn’t let you use the ‘right-click to play’ trick that we outlined earlier and Firefox doesn’t display the player at all. While this technique is fairly benign in most email clients, issues arise in Hotmail, where the controls are disabled, just as they were in our previous HTML5 video tests. Hotmail (and clients that don’t support HTML5) won’t rock with you The above snippet can be simply edited and pasted into the view of any multiline editable region in our template editor, which makes things easy if you just want to add an audio file to an article. Elsewhere, the fallback will be displayed: In Apple and iOS Mail, you should see an embedded player. So let’s say we have all this sorted out-adding a player is easy. Instead, you will have to host and stream the file from your own server. Make some noise for HTML5!īefore we go headlong into the code, we’d like to point out that, while the tag allows you to embed a media player into an email design, the audio isn’t embedded in the email message. Keep in mind that streaming music over a mobile data connection may end up being a costly exercise for those on metered plans, so this is certainly not a technique to use lightly. For accessibility reasons, you may want to even feature a spoken version of your message, for those who can’t see it. Or a language teacher and like providing pronunciation tips to your students. For example, lets say you’re a musician and want to provide your loyal fans with a convenient way to listen to your latest single. Putting sarcasm aside for a moment, there may be some pretty valid reasons why one would want to add recorded speech or music to an email newsletter. While this technique is only fully supported in Apple and iOS Mail (mind you, that’s almost 50% of recorded opens), the fairly-reliable display of fallback content in other clients makes it a possible addition to any email campaign.

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that you can play (and autoplay) music in HTML email, using the HTML5 tag. Ah, the good times, when having the ‘X-Files Theme’ forced on you was the tell-tale sign that you were indeed visiting a Geocities page. If you cut your teeth on coding the ’90s web, you probably remember things like auto-playing MIDI files with some perverse affection. However, there are instances when sound in email can not only be used, but used for good. If we were to create a list of bad email design ideas, adding music to email would probably be up there with using one big image as your email content.

Article first published December 2012, updated March 2019

Amazing audio player autoplay