Animated GIFS are delivery-safe, and provided they are used well, can help to significantly increase your click through and conversion rates.
How and when to use them
Animated GIFs are most effectively used for drawing attention to a call to action.
Headline messages and special offers will draw extra attention when animated.
What’s more, a well crafted animation can work as effectively as video to demonstrate how a product works and show different models and colours for example.
Cascading bullets or arrows can work brilliantly to draw the reader’s eye down to key content below the fold in your email.
Do’s and don’ts to follow when using animated GIFs in emails
Don’t use animated images ‘gratuitously’ – make sure an animation is there for a purpose and serves an objective.
Make your GIF easy on the eye. Limit the number of loops and don’t over use animations and turn your email into Piccadilly Circus. Less is more.
Keep the file weight down. You should keep your whole email size below 40K, so you may need to optimise your GIF down to keep it light.
Make sure you include the key message and/or the call to action in the initial frame.
Outlook 07 doesn’t render animations so the first frame will appear as a still image to many of your contacts.
You can use dotMailer Enterprise to build a segmentation query of email clients you know to support animated images, and target these specifically with your animations.