Like the video popularity, Animation as well has started winning hearts. Animation is a lot easier than video deployment. All that is needed is a static image in png or gif in email.
Picture is worth a thousand words and thus at times, animation without sound can work wonders too.
The GIF, which stands for Graphics Interchange Format, is an image format supported by various browsers and email clients. It can also be animated and the same animated GIF can be used in an email to draw the attention of the users.
Since GIFs are just another image file format, you can include an animated GIF the same way as any other image in your email.
Why use GIF?
Animated GIF delight the reader, whereas static email designs are boring and sometimes doesn’t attract the readers as much.
Buzzfeed, a strong proponent of embracing the GIF, has seen their email program grow from a single newsletter in 2012 to 14 different newsletters at the end of 2013.
According to an A/B test conducted by BlueFly, emails featuring an animated GIF pulled in 12% more revenue than their non-animated version.
According to Marketing Sherpa, using GIF in email can help increase the conversion rate by 103% (Case of Dell)
According to Email Institute, GIF in email increase a clickthrough rate up to 26%
As per the Experian email market study 1 in 2 marketers use animated gifs in their email campaigns.
You can find some more emails that have adopted GIFs in email in our newest blog.
Tackling the size issue
Some GIFs may also increase the email size creating a problem in delivering email.
While there are many tools available for creating GIFs, the go-to application for most designers is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop has a number of ways to create animated GIFs, including frame-by-frame animation, timeline animation, and importing video frames.
Using Photoshop, you can dig into the individual frames of an animated GIF and prune them to keep your file sizes down. Some good ways to optimize GIFs include:
– Cropping: Keep your focus on what is animated, cropping the image as much as possible to reduce the file size.
– Removing frames: The human eye doesn’t need a lot to see motion. You’d be surprised by how many frames you can remove from a GIF while still maintaining the illusion of motion.
– Only animate part of the picture: Don’t force the entire image to redraw itself in every frame. Use layers in Photoshop to isolate animated parts and only animate those layers.
GIF Email and Email Clients Support
Newer versions of Outlook (2007, 2010 and 2013) won’t show the animation. Instead, they will show the first frame of the animation. Windows Phone 7 also lacks support for animated GIFs.
However, Animated GIFs work beautifully on the below clients
| Desktop Clients |
| Lotus Notes (6, 7, 8.5) |
| Outlook 2000-2003 |
| Outlook for Mac |
| Apple Mail |
| Webmail Clients |
| Gmail |
| Yahoo! |
| AOL |
| Outlook.com |
| Mobile Clients |
| iOS Mail |
| Android (Default) |
| Android (Gmail) |
| Blackberry |
How well is your email campaign with including GIF in email ? Start the conversation in the comments below.