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An animated GIF in email is an inseparable and big part of an online conversation these days, whether it’s pronounced a ‘gif’ or ‘jif’. These short animations capture the essence, no matter if you’re having a great laugh with your Twitter followers or narrating tales in your friend group chat. These attention-grabbing moving images keep pace in various forms, from an email GIF to a Discord one.”
It may involve a few complexities in knowing when to use these animations in email marketing. Although GIFs can make any email look captivating by breathing new life into it, they can often lead to your audience being distracted from the central message. This is why determining scenarios in which this scalable, robust email GIF can boost your marketing efforts is of utmost importance. At the same time, you must focus on identifying the situations where your efforts could be in vain.
You might have heard of a famous maxim, “A picture is worth a thousand words!” However, as Alex Chung, the CEO and Co-founder of Giphy, quotes, “a well-placed GIF is worth 60,000 words!”
No points for guessing why highly successful email marketing strategies include a GIF in email. So, add animated GIFs to your emails and get the most out of marketing campaigns by creating a customised visual for your brand.
What is a GIF? Should You Use Them in Your Emails?
Back in 1987, GIF was developed by CompuServe. An abbreviation for ‘Graphics Interchange Format ‘, GIF is a soundless animation that was created from images or videos that repeat every few seconds.
Created almost three decades ago, the purpose of this specific type of file for digital images was to decrease the images’ file size and, at the same time, preserve their data. This technique led to an outstanding method for compressing images. In fact, it made these images transferable without slowing down the page speed.
The GIF’s ability to downsize a video’s numerous frames or animation into a single image file is simply commendable. The GIF file format did not take several years to gain immense popularity across the internet. From technically adept internet users to established website owners, these images (GIFs) have been selling like hotcakes to a wide range of audiences.
Not only are GIFs amusing, but they also capture one’s interest instantly. However, this hard fact does not make them appropriate to use by email marketers. Before you add a GIF to an email, think about what purpose it is going to serve.
- Will it boost a message or divert a person’s attention from it?
- Will customers feel motivated to click or simply smile?
- Is it wise and practical to use a GIF to reflect your brand and tone when interacting with your target audience?
If you understand how and why a GIF in email is worth taking a shot, you will soon realise these animations yield significant results for your email marketing campaign.
With tremendous dominance over the web, GIFs are nowadays used across various platforms – instant messaging, social media, content creation, and news media. It may instantly strike your mind that this is a GIF image the moment you see it, even if you have a hard time remembering its brief history.
As a matter of fact, you might consider using them as images to respond to specific situations when conversing with your known ones every day. It would not take a second thought for you to use it, and the next moment, you realise there’s one.
What are the Advantages of Using GIFs in Email Marketing?
Utilising GIFs – a highly effective and robust visual tool – within your email marketing campaigns offers you a multitude of significant advantages. This tool not only allows you to improve your engagement and email CTR (click-through rate), but it also helps you enhance outreach.
Here’s a list of some of the most popular benefits you get when you use an email marketing GIF:
1. Evoking Emotions
Any viewer can easily trigger an emotional response. Thanks to the ability of animated GIFs and visual references. You can look forward to building a lasting connection with your audience by using the right set of email GIFs. The text alone may not serve in your best interest.
2. Streamlining Complex Concepts
Trying to create an easy, quick tutorial for your services? Planning to build your new website’s short tour? No matter what you look forward to achieving, you can streamline complex concepts by defining them through captivating GIFs. You (as an email marketer) will find it easy to create brief emails with no compromise on the overall purpose.
3. Saving Time
When it comes to reading lengthy emails, several consumer segments don’t have the required time, nor the patience to do so. Even if their preferred ESP (email service provider) has sent them. This is where the effective role of an email GIF comes into play. In addition to saving time, they understand your message and take the necessary actions to execute a conversion. Moreover, they help consumers build a connection with your business. Need we say more?
4. Boosting ROI
It makes a significant contribution to your overall ROI when you can engage your audience, draw them in, and convey your message in the most effective manner. What you get in turn is that you reap benefits from your marketing spend. Through consistent campaigns, you can continue to get the most out of this medium.
How to Use GIFs In Emails
Using GIFs in emails through diverse approaches will work to your business’s advantage. It’s entirely at your discretion whether you want to learn about creating a tailored GIF or refer to some of the most popular websites for image sourcing.
Now, we share some of the most popular options that will help you use GIFs efficiently:
1. Use Your Email Client’s Image Uploader
While making changes to the editing interface, you can upload GIFs to the body of the email. Although it stands out as a demanding strategy, it uses a point-and-click interface.
2. Use Embedded Links
Execute this approach to incorporate your GIFs’ URLs in your email. You just need to paste the links to the GIFs when editing your email. This causes the GIF to load automatically through the given URL.
3. Use a Purpose-Built Client
Through a customised interface tool, you can effortlessly adjust the positioning of your GIF images. Moreover, you can align them with your email’s overall layout.
Make sure you learn about their copyright license when you’re using (third-party) GIFs within your emails. This ensures that the right parties receive credit without unknowingly taking unwarranted benefit of someone else’s hard work. It prevents you from running into legal challenges and causing damage to your reputation by using unauthorised digital property in your business emails without seeking permission.
What Can Go Wrong With GIFs in Email Marketing?
Every marketing instrument comes with its own set of drawbacks. A GIF in email can both make or break your email campaign. Listed below are some of them that you ought to know:
1. Some Email Clients Still Don’t Support GIFs
Your subscribers may be using the earlier version of Outlook dating back to 2007, 2010, or 2013. These versions will only show your message’s first frame, not the animation. Considering this, you must focus on ensuring that your first frame comprises the crucial info of your message – a combination of an offer and a CTA. A user will see the basic message if they don’t see your GIF.
2. Your Audience May Consider GIFs Unprofessional
It’s undeniable that not everyone takes interest in GIFs or emojis in emails. This is specifically true if they don’t link your serious brand with such lightheartedness. As a practical and responsible email marketer, you must emphasise knowing your audience inside out. In addition, you must also understand if your brand voice and tone allow you to use informal communication with your target audience.
Your audience viewing GIFed emails as inferior-quality content will be the last thing on your mind. Of course, it can prove detrimental to your brand reputation and hamper your email sender score.
3. Your GIFs Load Slowly
Large, storage-intensive GIFs can adversely affect load time. Moreover, they will not display the way you want them to. People with hardly any time won’t wait for your GIF to download. Keeping this in mind, ensure you optimise them all before you insert them into emails.
- Ensure the size doesn’t exceed 0.5 MB or 1 MB.
- Restrict the number of colours and frames.
- A regular newsletter has a width of 600px, so ensure you keep the same.
4. Your GIF Serves No Purpose
A purposeless GIF attracts an unfavourable reaction from users. Whether it offers informative or entertaining value, this tool is unsuitable for users and has no meaning for emails.
Before you add a GIF to your email, ensure you ask yourself the following questions:
- Will it be beneficial in the email?
- Will it serve any purpose?
- Does it really justify a send?
If you find your marketing message is clear without GIFs and you can send it without using animations (if any), kindly send it. You must not forget that GIFs won’t do any justice to your email campaign if the content lacks much-needed quality or isn’t worth your efforts.
How to Embed a GIF in an Email Campaign
When it comes to creating and designing customised emails, regular ESPs (email service providers) lack a simple, effective way to do so.
For instance, developing and sending a newsletter in Outlook or Gmail is a cumbersome process, not to mention being time-consuming.
A reliable, professionally designed marketing tool like TrueSend will reduce the time required to launch a campaign – from hours to minutes.
1. Choose an Email Template
Using one of the stunning pre-built email marketing templates as your starting point is your best bet.
Open your email campaign in TrueSend and choose the best email template designs.
2. Place an Image Block
Focus on the space where you’d like to add your animated GIF image, using an image block as a placeholder.
Choose and drag the image block’s edges. This will help you adjust the image dimensions.
Key Takeaway: Allow Your Message to Stand Out With GIFs
A GIF image can be a robust, flexible tool in your email marketing arsenal. You could seriously miss out on significant user engagement and sales opportunities if you don’t implement this innovative technology in your marketing campaigns. Other than being an extremely versatile tool, GIFs can help you get the message across in no time. Moreover, they help you capture user interest in a crowded inbox.
Some marketers believe that using GIFs in emails makes them come across as unprofessional, but that is certainly not the case. Use them in various ways to boost your email marketing – from humanizing your brand communication to enhancing comprehensibility and scannability.
Use visually stunning and compelling GIFs within your emails by implementing our bespoke email marketing designs and tools at TrueSend. Don’t hesitate to try out our robust, appealing email template for your next email marketing campaign.
FAQs
1. How do animated GIFs improve email click-through rates?
Apart from capturing user interest, GIFs demonstrate product features in real time. Moreover, they encourage readers to take a quick, desired action.
2. What is the recommended file size for email GIFs?
To ensure quick loading times across all available devices, keep GIF file sizes under 1MB.
3. Are animated GIFs supported across all email clients?
Most clients support GIFs. However, older versions of Outlook showcase only the first static frame.
4. How many GIFs should you use per email campaign?
You must use only one primary GIF per email. It will not only prevent overwhelming your readers but also reduce load speed.
5. How do you optimize email GIFs for mobile devices?
To optimise email GIFs for mobile devices, you can compress them and keep their dimensions compact. Also, you must ensure that the main message appears instantly.
