8 Tips forSuccess withAnimated Gifs

Hi and welcome. Today Ill be discussing the process of using animated gifs in your email marketing campaigns. Weve all seen them. Sometimes they are fun and sometimes they are not. In this presentation Ill be presenting a few good rules to follow if you plan to use them in your email marketing campaigns.

Animated gifs can be a great way to spice up your email, but remember that word spice. Like spice, animated gifs should used in moderation. Studies show that sometimes these gifs can increase reader response, while other times they have exactly the opposite effect. Also keep in mind that using them all the time can lead to a deadening of their effectiveness. A key advantage of an animated gif is its unexpectedness. If you use them all the time, you are losing that advantage.

Tip #1: Dont Distract From the Message

An animated gif that keeps the readers eyes focused on the image and not the message can do more harm than good. The woman in the Singer 22 email is very beautiful and her movement certainly catches our eye, but her continuous movement distracts us from the main message. Fortunately in this case that message isnt very important. Had this email contained a message about savings or new stock, then a better course of action would be to stop the gifs animation after one or two run-throughs, allowing the reader to move on to the substance of the message.

Tip #2: Slow Down Your Transitions

One of the most common uses of animated gifs is to allow for more than one image to appear as the main hero image. A store that is selling sweaters, such as those shown on the right, might want to cycle through a few different sweaters in hopes that one of them will catch the eye of the recipient. The standard animation rate used for these kinds of gifs is one second. Thats enough if you are displaying variations on the same thing, but the more varied the images, the slower you should cycle through them. For the sweaters on the left, the one second is just enough time to get a sense of the clothing displayed. Given that the four items of clothing here are not from the same line, however, I would have recommended a slight slow down, but one second is acceptable. In the gif on the right, the five images are as different as can be, so the one second display rate is far too short to get any kind of appreciation for the items on display. Our mind is barely done processing the first image when the second one appears.

This slide also demonstrates a secondary danger of putting more than one animation in the same area. Its distracting isnt it?

Tip #3: Never More Than Four

If you are going to use an animated gif to show several different items in the same space, then limit your display to no more than four items. Three is better. Too many transitions in your animation, and the gif starts to lose its effectiveness. If you havent gotten your point across after four images, you probably never will. This also keeps the file size from getting out of hand, and ensures that the reader wont have to wait too long to see the first item in the list again.

Tip #4: First Frame Should Say It All

What everyone else eventually sees:

What Microsoft outlook users see:

While most email clients now accept animated gifs and display them correctly, there is one platform that does not. Unfortunately, that platform is Microsoft Outlookone of the most popular email readers on the planet. For this reason, you need to make sure that any message placed in your animated gif appears in the first frame. If the gif animation is intended as a slow reveal, then set that first frame to have no time interval. It will appear in the blink of an eye before the actual animation begins, but it will give Outlook users the whole message

Here is an example from Kohls where the last frame was not used as the first frame, and a truck rolls across the display announcing that this sale ends in two days. All that Outlook users will see is a blank red rectangle and no information about time limits.

Tip #5: It Needs a Reason to Exist

Animated gifs are fun to create, but you need to ask yourself before going forward: Does this gif has a good reason to be there? When the folks at Dell decided to use this animation to show off their new convertible laptop/tablet, they looked at all the possible ways to display this information before the settled on the animated gif. The result turned out to be a success and demonstrates. Readers could quickly understand a feature that would have been much harder to put across in words.

Animated gifs need a reason to be there. This is not to say they cant exist just for the fun of it. Sometimes fun is a compelling enough reason if your email response rates have been flagging. As with any new or experimental campaign, you should always split test animated gif emails before a mass mailing. What works for you might not work for everybody.

Tip #6: Dont be a Blinker

Anyone here remember Blink? Blink was a very popular HTML tag back in the early days of the Internet. Its still available, but you rarely see it used much anymore. Flashing text is annoying. No web designer worth his or her salt would use the blink tag anymore, and yet every day I receive emails with animated gifs that do essentially the same thing. The example show here is the visual equivalent of blink. I cant imagine anyone keeping this email open very long before deleting it.

This is especially important with animations that continuously cycle through a succession of images, and even more important with brightly colored objects.

Dont be a blinker.

Tips #7: Subtle is Better

A safer approach is go subtle. There is a tendency to think of animated gifs as annoying blinking images that make email unreadable, but a subtle touch can make an email interesting without distracting from the main message. A countdown clock can serve to convey that a sale will be ending soon, even when it is screened back behind the main image or inserted into one of the characters. This avoids the irritation factor, but it also runs the risk of being too subtle to add any value to the image. In this example, it is easy to overlook the ticking clock, so would this image have been just as effective without the animation?

Tip #8: Try Cinemagraphs

An interesting approach to the endless loop in animated gifs is something called a Cinemagraph. Invented by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg or Ann Street Studios, the movement in a Cinemagraph is subtle and repetitive. Instead of giving the impression of a forward stream of movement, these make the gifs seems almost alive. The secret to Cinemagraphs is the use of subtle movement that seems less like a repeat than a continuous flow. In the one shown here, the womans hair moves gently in the breeze. It is so subtle that it is barely noticeable on a conscious level, but it still resonates on a subconscious level.

Cinemagraphs is a trademark of Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg

Things to Remember

The Subject Line is more important than an animation.

Animated Gifs are a spice, not the main course.

Split test all animations (and videos too).

No animated gif, no matter how good it is, is going to make any impact at all if the recipient isnt persuaded to at least take a look at it. The best gif in the world, then, is still at the mercy of an emails subject line, so dont neglect it.

As I said earlier, animated gifs are a spice, so treat them accordingly. A few sprinkled here and there is nice, but a steady course of them kills their effectiveness.

When you are starting with animations, do some split tests to get a better sense of your audience. Not everyone responds to animations. You may find that your audience tunes them out, so why spend the time making them then?

Resources

Goolara Blog http://blog.goolara.com/2014/07/07/using-animated-gifs/ The Goolara Blog post on animated Gifs.

Smart Animated Gifs http://goolara.com/Resources/WhitePapers.aspx#Smart-Animated-Gifs Goolaras definitive guide to animated gifs.

Cinemagraphs http://annstreetstudio.com/category/cinemagraphs/ For examples of Cinemagraphs, visit Jamie Becks and Kevin Burgs Ann Street Studios site..

To learn more about animated gifs, you may also visit our blog, which goes into more depth on the subject.

We have also created a guide to the subject that covers the subject in greater depth.

You can also see some stunning examples of Cinemagraphs at Jamie Becks and Kevin Burgs Ann Street Studios website.

To find out more about our email marketing software, visit our website at goolara.com, or you can email us at info@goolara.com, or call our toll-free number:1-888-362-4575.

Thank you for joining me today!

About Goolara

Goolara, LLC is the maker of Symphoniepowerful email marketing software with the advanced features a professional marketer needs, but without the hassle of other systems. For a demonstration, call 1-888-362-4575 toll free, or visit http://goolara.com/RequestDemo.aspx and request a demo.

At Goolara, we work hard to make sure our email marketing solution, Symphonie, has all the features that a professional marketer needs to create actionable emails. Features such as dynamic content and transactional emails are included in every version of Symphonie. Symphonie is available in both on-premise and cloud-based versions. Visit our website at http://goolara.com to learn more and thank you for visiting this presentation.