Text is obviously a critical component of any marketing email, but marketers often overlook the importance of visual content. Readers are more likely to engage with your newsletter and make purchases if you include different types of content in your messaging.
This article will teach you how to put a GIF in an email and explain how this can help improve marketing performance. The perfect GIF can make your newsletter feel more personal and relevant compared to the same email with no visual content.
What is a GIF?
GIFs have been around for a long time, but brands have recently begun to utilize them for marketing purposes. The term itself is an acronym for Graphic Interchange Format, which was first created in 1987.
Unlike many other image formats, GIFs can include multiple frames and therefore illustrate motion. This makes them far more versatile than JPEGs and PNGs. Furthermore, advancements in compression have made it possible to reduce the file’s size without impacting its content.
Virtually every email platform supports GIFs, with the notable exceptions of Outlook 2007, 2010, and 2013, which aren’t able to display the animation. GIFs are one of the easiest ways to add dynamic visual content to your newsletter without embedding a video. You can work around Outlook’s limitations by making sure that the image’s first frame includes any critical information.
On the other hand, GIFs don’t include audio, so they’re not as effective for in-depth or long-form content. Different situations call for different file formats, so it’s critical to understand the pros and cons of each option. We’ll cover some ideas for using GIFs in marketing emails later on.
How to Insert a GIF into an Email
The steps to add a GIF to an upcoming email depend on whether you want to create the GIF yourself or use one that’s already out there. Fortunately, many services streamline the process of developing a GIF for your newsletter.
If the GIF is online, you’ll simply need to copy its link in order to embed the image. While you can add a GIF using your email marketing software, existing GIFs can also be sent through conventional email platforms like Gmail.
Regardless of whether you’re creating the GIF, you can add it by copying an online link or uploading the file from your device. Either way, make sure to preview the message or send a test email to yourself to confirm that the GIF displays correctly.
Where to Find GIFs
Developing your own GIF might sound overwhelming, but there have never been more options available to marketers. Your creativity is the only limit to your capabilities, and brands in virtually every field are constantly experimenting with new ways of using GIFs.
Gifs.com
Gifs.com is designed to turn videos of all kinds into GIFs, and it currently supports videos from platforms like Youtube, Instagram, and Vine. While you can create GIFs for free, paid users can remove the gifs.com watermark, edit existing GIFs, and access a number of additional features. Pricing depends on scale, so you can start small and expand later on as needed.
Pixabay
While Pixabay doesn’t offer the ability to create your own GIFs, it offers one of the largest collections of freely accessible video content on the internet. In contrast to GIPHY and similar platforms, the GIFs on Pixabay can be used for both personal and commercial purposes.
Pixabay doesn’t require you to credit the GIF’s original creator in your content, but you should still include a small attribution as a token of your appreciation. There are stock images and GIFs covering anything you can think of, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding good visual content on Pixabay.
GIPHY Cam
There are a number of apps dedicated to creating GIFs, but GIPHY Cam is one of the best on both iOS and Android. It allows users to develop GIFs extremely quickly and add a variety of effects to the finished product. In addition to email, you can also share finished GIFs to Twitter, Facebook, or text.
Limiting File Size
Keep in mind that larger GIFs may not load well on some devices. In general, it’s best to keep the file size below around 250 KB to prevent slowdown and other issues. Remember that you need the GIF to work on every reader’s device.
As mentioned above, a number of compression services can reduce file size without reducing image quality. That said, GIF compression isn’t particularly effective, and it usually won’t have more than a small impact on its own.
With that in mind, you’ll need to edit your own GIFs if you want to create a substantially smaller file. There are a few ways to cut out unnecessary components in order to make a GIF more efficient, but this can also hurt its quality.
The right method depends on the individual GIF—for example, GIFs that only use a few colors can be compressed by shrinking the color palette, while the same process could make a colorful GIF look much worse.
- Removing excess colors can make a GIF smaller by allowing it to rely on fewer elements. On the other hand, this requires merging multiple colors into one, so it could make the image less visually clear.
- Similarly, reducing the total number of frames is arguably the simplest method of compressing a GIF. Of course, you can only remove a certain number of frames before you start to notice a difference in quality.
- Online tools like EZGIF offer the ability to increase efficiency by moving static sections to the background. Without this feature, a GIF could increase significantly in size simply by loading the same element in each frame.
Most GIF compression options change the composition of the image, and every image is composed differently. For example, a GIF that only includes motion in a small section could be dramatically compressed by treating the rest of the image as a background layer. You can always improve compression by cropping the image or trimming frames from the beginning or end of the GIF.
Engaging Audiences through GIFs
Like any other form of content, GIFs can be valuable or useless depending on how they’re used. With that in mind, you shouldn’t add a GIF to your next email simply because you heard GIFs are powerful marketing tools. Instead, each GIF should be closely connected to the rest of the email.
There are far too many ways to leverage GIFs in email marketing to cover in a single article. The important thing is to use GIFs in ways that add to the customer experience. This section will give you some ideas to start with as you start implementing GIFs in your email campaigns.
Product Demonstrations
Audiences don’t spend much time skimming each email, and the average reader won’t take the time to read an entire product description. Similarly, product demonstration videos often include too much extraneous information rather than focusing on the core functionality.
In many cases, GIFs are the most efficient way to illustrate how a product works. Rather than having someone explain its functions, a GIF simply displays them in an easily understandable format.
GIFs are limited to just 500 frames, which works out to just under 21 seconds at 24 frames per second. Product demonstration GIFs are therefore best in situations where the most important information can be covered relatively quickly. You should consider using a video for more intricate demos.
Emphasizing the Call to Action
The call to action is a central element in every marketing email, and GIFs can be used to draw your audience’s attention back to the CTA. While the rest of the message still matters, you don’t want readers to lose sight of the call to action.
In fact, you can even make the GIF itself the call to action by making it link to your website or store. Making your CTAs more visually distinct will have a significant effect on sales, clicks, and other crucial metrics.
Product Visualizations
While demonstrations are helpful for items that function in a specific way, visualization is just as important for products like clothing and accessories. Instead of showing how it works, a GIF could feature multiple perspectives or views of the same item in different colors.
Effectively displaying products is a critical obstacle for online vendors of all kinds, and GIFs take your readers one step closer to understanding how your items look and feel. You can even display multiple products in a GIF by putting a different item in each frame—just don’t forget to compress the file by moving the rest of the image to the background.
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Walls of text are no longer a viable option for email marketing, and GIFs are becoming more and more popular as brands begin to optimize their visual content. These ideas will help you create more effective email campaigns and engage with readers through GIFs.
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This article was originally published by our friends at Omnisend.
