have the intended recipients of the email explicitly asked for this embedded video

The recipients have agreed to receive emails - not specifically ones with a linked image

We already send this kind of email but "manually" create the GIF using an online tool. The reception is pretty good. Such emails have a much higher response rate than usual and an almost zero unsubscribe rate.

Several companies - notably BombBomb and Loom - make products specifically to do this. Both are very good but we don't want to pay the price they charge for the volume of video emails we send.