You may find it surprising, but brands across the globe use animated stickers and GIFs in their marketing campaigns. From the biggest names to the smallest e-commerce brands on Instagram, GIFs have made daily marketing campaigns a remarkable success. It has not only improved sales but also boosted brand awareness.
So, what on earth is an animated GIF? With varying pronunciations, GIF or Graphics Interchange Format is an animated image pattern with over 30 years of history.
- The reason behind their animated appearance is that they feature a plethora of image frames, which is akin to a flipbook’s digital version.
- If you browse through GIF you’ll find that you’ve converted most of them from videos.
- In most cases, marketers make GIFs featuring a single animated component and static backdrops, such as a person, an object, or text, to illustrate the movement inside the GIF.
- GIFs can enhance marketing. With the domination of visual communication today, GIFs are the go-to dens for marketers, with 1 billion users using GIFs per day.
- Brands know that people use this format daily for a wide variety of reasons, which include highlighting a feeling, sharing a reaction, noting or notifying an event, and many more.
- That’s one reason why brands started experimenting with GIFs in their marketing directives. You can use them in social media posts, emails, and blog posts.
A brief guide
Email marketers are perpetually trying to enhance their campaigns by using images, designs, and copies. They are perpetually seeking something unique to set them apart from the others in your inbox and lure your attention to their emails. They need something to entice readers/audiences to click through their content and care about their content/message.
- Many brands are discovering that animation is a tool to boost subscriber engagement.
- They are increasingly using animated GIFs in emails to provide additional interest.
- In 2019, 61% of email marketers said that they used animated GIFs in their marketing emails.
- Using GIFs adds an element of interest and delight to your campaign that is not possible or typically viable with traditional email designs.
- Numerous campaigns integrate animated GIFs for thrill and humour and achieve their goal with stupendous success.
- Leading women’s clothing brands use animated presents to build a sense of mystery and intrigue, propelling subscribers and readers to click through the email to unwrap the present.
- Often, a GIF is enough to rattle and surprise an audience, generate their interest, and propel them to click through to a social media landing page.
- Many Instagram followers and FB moderators have used this trick to promote their email client market share infographic.
Some pivotal considerations
There are a few things to consider before integrating GIFs into your email marketing program. Take the pros and cons of implementing GIFs. Before diving into the format, you need to raise a few questions.
- Know if the GIF will work in your email and whether it’ll provide value to your campaign or not.
- Is the email really worth sending? Also, underline the restrictions you need to be aware of.
- GIFs do sync with emails. It’s great news that the utility of animated GIFs is universal across the world.
- In most of the Outlook series, you only have the first frames displayed. It means that if your GIFs contain any crucial information, they must feature the first frame, or they will lose out.
You can categorize these directives for desktop email clients, web-based email clients, and mobile email clients. Send an animated sticker in your email campaign isn’t as tricky as it appears to be initially. It all boils down to what client you’re sending. Some clients allow brands to embed the concerned HTML code into the body of your email message.
Others can attach it separately due to the media’s size. Anyway, GIFs fall under the picture or image category, which means you need to follow specific instructions from your client in this regard.
More on the consideration
Mailbox support is pivotal. The top three most renowned email clients, Apple Mail, Gmail, and Apple iPhone, support the stickers. The GIF’s size is equally important. Make sure it’s under 1MB because desktop users with sluggish and unstable connections and all mobile account users constitute more than 50% of every opened email.
- The larger the size of the file, the longer it takes to load fully. Your clients and subscribers can scroll down the email without viewing it.
- Fortunately, you have a cluster of services for compressing a GIF. These are Compressor.io, IloveIMG and Ezgif.
- Do remember that to convert a video to GIF format without any editing, use a dedicated online converter.
- Additionally, pay attention to its width. Most emails have 600 pixels in width. So, make sure to comply with that dimension.
- If your email template entails multiple columns, you need to reduce the sizes accordingly.
- For example, if you have two equal rows and columns, your GIF must be 300 pixels each.
- Accessibility problems are also noteworthy. Visual impairment may cause viewing issues with frame frequency, animated content and flashing.
- It can trigger mismatches and seizures. To make your emails accessible to clients and screen readers, you need to implement alternative GIF texts.
Impact of animated GIFs
For the past three years, GIFs have been in vogue in email marketing and content marketing. GIFs undoubtedly add more value to your emails and improve your content for the reader.
GIFs can improve your message in two ways. It shows how the reader/subscriber is currently feeling or wants to feel. You may have seen stickers displaying emotions that showcase confusion, overworking, upset mood, and fun and delight on social media.
These are powerful tools to understand your readers. When you fathom these emotions or behavioural patterns, you can nurture and foster a relationship with your client/reader. American clothing lines are using GIFs extensively in their email campaigns.
They use the key benefit of their clothes with tags like ‘super soft’ and ‘power-washed’. These things alone don’t suffice your readers’ attention. However, a GIF simulates clothing range when it catches your subscriber’s eyes and fancy.
Author Bio – Ariya Stark has been working on the importance of social media in marketing, with thousands of real Instagram followers for her postings.
