Best Practices for Gifs in Marketing Email

[ALeonard1]

Hey everyone, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on using gifs in marketing emails. I personally believe they are effective at increasing engagement if used sparingly, but I haven’t done much A/B testing. Have you? How do they affect open and clickthrough rates?

I am concerned about how large gif files usually are. I’ve found these resources on the matter:

• In another thread, @Dev_TRooInbound said “The ideal size of GIF should be upto 1mb.” @jmclaren also chimed in.
• Litmus cites someone who “advises keeping files under 5 MB. Here at Litmus, we’re trying to keep GIFs under 1 MB”
• email on acid says to aim for under 200kb

On that note, does anyone recommend a free tool to reduce gif sizes? There are plenty online, but they tend to look sketchy. I love https://squoosh.app/ for reducing image file sizes, but they don’t work with gifs.

Thanks!

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @ALeonard1,

this is an interesting topic, than you for posting!

I wanted to tag in a couple of subject matter experts to see if they have any thoughts on this:

hi @DavidDennison, @Ian_Matt, @Jonno_Price, any experience with GIFs in marketing emails? Thanks!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team

[Jonno_Price]

Hi there,

Not sure of any specific metrics in terms of A/B testing but think that in the right context gifs can make a marketing email stand out and be more enjoyable to consume. I wouldn’t use gifs in one-to-one sales email as think that is best to be plain text. But for marketing email, newsletters etc, and the right audience, then sure why not. Also Canva has introduced a gif maker so you can create nice on-brand gifs easily.

There are of course limitations including the size issue you mention. The smaller the better of course. Also people with older versions of Outlook won’t get to see the gif by default.
As for resizer, I normally just use one of the web ones - like Ezgif or similar. For Mac users there is this little app you can download: ImageOptim — better Save for Web
Happy giffing