Empty Bag Oh No Funny Gif
As an email marketer, yous're always trying to improve your campaigns through the utilise of re-create, design, and images. But with so much competition for subscribers' attention, it's no surprise you might want something to set you apart—enticing readers to click through and care near your message. One way to do this? Animated GIFs.
Adding animation might be merely the thing you demand to increase subscriber date. Email marketers like you are increasingly turning to animated GIFs in e-mail to provide that extra interest. Co-ordinate to our 2020 Land of Email data, 51.28% of marketers said they're using animated GIFs at least sometimes in their marketing emails.
So how tin can you get in on this activity? In this blog mail, we'll cover:
- What a GIF is
- The benefits (with inspiring examples)
- The downsides of animated GIFs
- How to make blithe GIFs
- Electronic mail client support and load times
What is a GIF?
GIF, which stands for Graphics Interchange Format, is an prototype format developed by CompuServe in 1987. Due to wide support across browsers and email clients, GIFs accept been a popular paradigm format since the early on days of the internet.
More chiefly, though, GIFs can be animated. Similar to how a flipbook works, GIFs speedily brandish a series of images to produce the illusion of motion. In the internet'due south early years, GIFs (and the marquee and glimmer tags) were the primary method of adding motility to a web page.
A lot has changed since the 1990s. Blithe GIFs are enjoying a renaissance both on the spider web and in email marketing. While in that location is still some debate every bit to how you actually pronounce "GIF," most will agree that GIFs tin be an excellent marketing tool.
The benefits of animated GIFs in e-mail
Whether you prefer a hard "Grand" or similar to rhyme GIF with a sure brand of peanut butter, let's expect at why GIFs are so useful in emails.
Grab your subscribers' attention
Adding motion to your e-mail with a GIF is a great fashion to grab your subscribers' attention, point them toward an activeness y'all want them to take, or keep them scrolling to make sure they get your whole message.
Google uses a cute GIF to gloat their subscribers.
Grammarly uses a subtle animation to draw even more attention to their offer.
Xfinity places their GIF further down in the email to draw their subscribers in and encourage them to scroll.
We used a false video GIF to describe attention to our video and go subscribers interested in clicking to run into more than.
Show off your products and services
You know your production is dandy. Make sure your subscribers know it, as well. There's cipher similar an animated GIF to show off how your product or service works.
ILIA Dazzler showcases their product in action with real people.
Webflow shows their product in action so subscribers know what to look.
Magic Spoon shows off their unlike flavors and awesome package design.
Simplify a circuitous idea
If a moving picture is worth a thousand words, then an animated picture is probably worth even more. Use an blithe GIF to illustrate a complex thought or show your subscribers that things are even easier than they think.
Baggu took uncomplicated cleaning directions to the next level by animating them. By making 4 different animations, the subscribers have to ringlet to see the whole story.
Finding your at-home sounds simple. But over the past twelvemonth, we've all realized how hard it tin can be. Headspace shows yous how to find your calm with a GIF better than anyone could explain with words.
Tease something new or coming soon
Do you have some new content or product you lot're nearly to release? Accept a neat offer coming out soon? Use an animated GIF to create awareness or interest in your product—and take subscribers looking out for your next email.
Apple teases an extended Black Friday sale and urges subscribers to "relieve the dates" for shopping and so they don't miss out on deals.
Linus' electrical bike is just hinted at in the shadows in this email. Subscribers will have to click through to run into the actual product.
Tinker teases both a Black Friday sale besides as a limited edition watch with this animated GIF to continue subscribers looking out for the side by side e-mail with more information.
The downsides of blithe GIFs
As wonderful as animated GIFs are, they aren't without their faults.
Lack of accessibility
Animated GIFs can pose a problem in terms of accessibility for a diversity of reasons.
Content flashing rates betwixt 2 Hz and 55 Hz can harm users with photosensitive epilepsy. In addition, users who are visually impaired may accept difficulty reading or reviewing content on a GIF before the animation changes. So, ensure your animated GIFs either have smoothen transitions or don't animate from one frame to the next at a loftier rate.
And, since GIFs are prototype files, you should e'er include appropriate alternative text for users who rely on assistive engineering science like screen readers. Images are inherently inaccessible for a lot of people, so providing copy and context allows them to understand your message more clearly.
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Poor background transparency
If you need to bring more than color or some background transparency to your blithe content, then an animated GIF may not exist the way to become.
GIFs are non graceful when it comes to transparent backgrounds. Simply fear not, yous can bring an blithe alternative to email in the course of an animated PNG (APNG). Be certain to have note of the same compressions tips and tricks nosotros share next since APNGs also like to pile on the kilobytes (KB).
And if you're looking for yet another alternative to blithe GIFs, you might desire to explore CSS animations.
How to make an animated GIF for e-mail
GIF creation can be washed a number of ways. You can use online makers that allow you lot to animate a selection of photos or turn a video into an animated GIF. Or you can use software such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Animate to brand custom designs movement.
My preferred way of creating animated GIFs is to work within Adobe Breathing. This is born out of years of working in Flash back in the twenty-four hours. As Wink got retired, Adobe Animate took over, retaining some of Flash'south features while bringing in more than output options such every bit HTML5, video, and animated GIF.
So I'll dive into how to make an animated GIF in Adobe Breathing.
Creating with Adobe Animate
Step ane: Create a new file and input dimensions
To make a GIF in Adobe Breathing, first create a new file and input the dimensions you would like this to exist. Pro tip: Create your animation at twice the size for retina display, merely as you might for static imagery.
Step 2: Import the graphics to be animated
You can design your animation direct onto the canvass, using the software's shape and drawing tools, creating a layer for each element. If you created the design for your animation in Adobe Illustrator, yous can simply copy and paste your vector graphics onto your sheet. Otherwise, you lot tin import graphics into Adobe Animate past going to file > import > import to stage. Or if yous're importing a graphic that will be reused multiple times, yous tin "import to library."
Step 3: Create your animation
At present you tin employ the timeline to create your blitheness. In that location are a lot of possibilities with software like this, and information technology would be hard to impact all of these in a single blog post. However, there's a wealth of resources out in that location with many helpful guides on YouTube, in Adobe'due south online tutorials, and within the software itself.
I would recommend paying particular attention to content around symbols, tweening, and ease. With these iii functions alone, y'all can create highly engaging animation that helps grab attention, push your message, and delight your audition. All while bringing buckets of make personality to your emails.
Symbols
A symbol is a graphic, button, or moving-picture show prune that y'all create once and and so re-use past selecting it from the library.
Once you lot've created a symbol, yous tin re-use it within your animation—this is called an instance. If you lot were to edit your symbol, such as change the color, that change would be made across all instances (like to e-mail partials). Merely if you were to edit an instance, your alter would only utilize to that ane instance.
For animated GIFs, I suggest only converting your design elements to graphic symbols. Both moving picture clips and buttons have their own timeline attached to them, so you can breathing them independently of the main timeline. However, as any animations created outside of the principal timeline aren't honored when you export your animation as a GIF, information technology makes sense to stick with graphic symbols which just animate on the main timeline.
Tweening
Tweening is how yous animate from ane state to some other. You tin use either shape, motion, or classic tweens.
A shape tween can only be used with shapes or elements that you've fatigued on to either the canvas or vectors imported using AI importer preferences (rather than every bit a bitmap). This is considering a shape tween enables you to alter the shape of an object. For example: You could add a circle to one keyframe on your timeline, add together a square on some other, so morph your circle into your square with the shape tween.
Motion tweens are used to create blitheness movements by specifying different values between the first and the last frames. With this kind of tween, y'all can alter an object's backdrop—including position, size, color, effects, filters, and rotation.
Classic tween is very like to move tweening. It was carried over from Flash and is retained within Animate as an boosted option. This is my preferred way to apply motion tweening, as easing techniques (discussed below) are a footling more straightforward to apply.
Ease
Easing goes hand in manus with tweening. If moving an object from one position to some other using the timeline is the block, then easing is the frosting!
Using Breathing'south ease functionality, you can brand the tween accelerate or decelerate at the showtime or end. Or add a lilliputian bounce when the tween completes. This really helps bring some personality to your animation.
The ease applied to this tween starts the blitheness quickly and slows at the cease.
Here I take applied a bounciness-in ease to my tween.
For information on how to apply easing check out this video on YouTube.
Step iv: Export your animated GIF
Saving your blitheness out of Adobe Animate as a GIF is nice and simple. Just head to File > Export > Export Animated GIF.
Keeping your file size down
Regardless of how you lot create your animated GIF—either with Adobe Animate or something else—keeping your file size down is crucial for email. In that location are a few things worth considering to aid you keep your animations as lite as possible.
Compression
Tools similar Animate and Photoshop accept express compression options for GIFs; it's oftentimes better to use external software instead for pinch. I recommend ImageOptim, which is gratis to download, or EZgif, a free online GIF optimizing tool, to get your file size downwards to its optimum weight. Personally, I like to go along mine below ane megabyte (MB), but the optimal file size will vary and depends on electronic mail load time which nosotros discuss later in this blog post.
Flat color
Including photography or gradients in your animation adds weight due to the corporeality of colors and shades these comprise. A GIF can only contain 256 colors—compared to a JPEG which can include upward of xvi one thousand thousand—which oft results in the quality taking a hit. So keeping things elementary is key.
Express frames
The shorter the animation, the better. Each frame your blitheness contains adds weight to the GIF. Since an animation should really be about complimenting your copy, it makes sense to limit how long your animation plays and encourage readers to move downwardly the e-mail.
If you notice that your GIF is conveying a little likewise much weight after saving and compressing, you can remove frames using Photoshop or EZgif.
Proofing your animated GIF
At present that yous've completed your GIF, you may want to get feedback or blessing before placing it within your e-mail. With a real-fourth dimension collaboration tool like Litmus Proof, you can centralize everyone'south comments and approvals.
Implementing blithe GIFs in email
Once you take your GIF ready to go, y'all can include it in your email much the same way y'all would add any other image file:
However, there are a couple of unique things you lot need to consider: which email clients back up animated GIFs and how long they have to load in your email.
Support
Animated GIFs are supported well-nigh everywhere. Outlook recently updated its support for animated GIFs, but this only affects Office365. Outlook 2007-2019 notwithstanding don't back up animated GIFs.
Here's a quick nautical chart of which email clients exercise and don't support blithe GIFs:
| Desktop Clients | Webmail Clients | Mobile Clients |
| Outlook 2000-2003 ✓ | Gmail ✓ | iOS Mail service ✓ |
| Outlook 2007-2019 ✘ | G Suite ✓ | Gmail ✓ |
| Outlook for Mac ✓ | Yahoo! Mail ✓ | Gmail IMAP ✓ |
| Apple Post ✓ | AOL ✓ | Samsung Mail service ✓ |
| Windows x Mail ✓ | Outlook.com ✓ | Outlook ✓ |
| Office365 ✓ | Office365 ✓ | Yahoo ✓ |
| Comcast ✓ | AOL ✓ | |
| Orange.fr ✓ | ||
| SFR.fr ✓ | ||
| GMX.de ✓ | ||
| Web.de ✓ | ||
| T-Online.de ✓ | ||
| Freenet.de ✓ | ||
| Post.ru ✓ |
To maintain a bully feel where animated GIFs are not supported, be certain to make the starting time frame contain everything you need every bit a static fallback.
You could also provide a fallback for Outlook past hiding the normal GIF image and displaying a static image and/or different content inside Outlook conditionals:
Load time
Earlier, we discussed file sizes. Load time is where the file size becomes very of import.
You can test load times with a tool like Litmus' automated pre-send testing checklist to run across if your images are taking too long to load. On average, we've constitute that simply over one-half of recipients only spend less than two seconds on an e-mail. Then your blithe GIFs need to load fast to make an impression.
We tested different file sizes to find their average loading speeds over different connections. On average, a 4.4MB animated GIF can take over two times longer to load over a 4G LTE connection than over an Ethernet connectedness.
Here are some average speeds for different file sizes on unlike connections based on our own experiment:
Average Content Download Speed (in seconds)
| File Size | 4G LTE | WiFi | Ethernet |
| 180kB GIF | 0.37 | 0.29 | 0.22 |
| 1MB GIF | 1.eighteen | 0.54 | 0.44 |
| 3.2MB GIF | 2.87 | 1.44 | 1.04 |
| 4.4MB GIF | iii.23 | one.83 | one.34 |
These times are the content download speed and don't take into account the fourth dimension to first byte (TTFB). TTFB is a way to measure the responsiveness of a web server. And so if you're hosting your images on a server that is slow to reply, the load times for the animated GIFs would increase for your subscribers.
On top of slower load times, animated GIFs with larger file sizes will likewise utilize up data faster, which your subscribers probably won't be happy about. I used upwardly my data just testing GIF file size download speeds for this blog postal service, so it'due south super easy to exercise. Permit your subscribers go along every bit much of their data for fun stuff instead of loading your e-mail.
Since you don't have command over your server speed, your subscriber's connection, or your subscriber'south data programme, it becomes extremely of import to make sure that your animated GIFs are small-scale plenty to ensure that your audience tin can view information technology no affair where they're opening your e-mail. We recommend 1MB at the largest.
Final thoughts
Blithe GIFs have the power to delight, wow, and obsess your electronic mail subscribers. But, make sure yous use your GIFs wisely! Your subscribers should always stay at the pinnacle of your mind when creating and implementing GIFs in your emails. Don't animate just because y'all can—think of how it'll benefit your audience.
We can't wait to see what you create!
This blog post was originally published on Jan ix, 2020, by Jason Rodriguez. It has been updated for clarity and with new data on Feb 23, 2021.
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Source: https://www.litmus.com/blog/a-guide-to-animated-gifs-in-email/
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