Animated gifs in email
Hey, great news! Animated gifs are supported in email. And you should never use them. Ha! I got ya!
A lot of people get excited about the idea of putting an animated gif in a marketing email, and I hate to burst their bubble, but it's almost always a bad idea — with some rare exceptions!
First, there are two big challenges with animated gifs in email:
Problem #1: Outlook support
Gifs simply don't play in older versions of Outlook for Windows. If you're in the pharma world like I am, HCPs are very likely to use Outlook for Windows, so if the email is for that audience, the risk that the gif will not play is dangerously high.
When an animated gif doesn't play in an email, it just shows the first frame of animation as a static image. You may or may not be able to design an animated gif that degrades gracefully into a static image, where the user won't notice a thing.
Good example: A small butterfly up in the corner of the email, slowly flapping its wings. If this gif doesn't play for some users, it's no big deal! It just becomes a static butterfly image.
Bad example: An animated header gif, with the headline fading in or sliding in. In the first frame, the text isn't visible yet, so if a user can't see the animation playing, the message is totally lost!
Another bad example: An animated chart that grows and builds from nothing. Some users will just see the nothing.
Even if you are able to design an animated gif that degrades gracefully into just that first static frame, you can't escape the next problem...
Problem #2: file size
Animated gifs tend to have a very large file size, often in the megabtyes, and this may cause the email to download very slowly. So, not a great user experience, and it may result in people bouncing.
In some cases (e.g. a user opening an email while on slow public wifi), a large gif won't even fully download, and that area in the email just remains totally blank. Yikes.
And here's an even bigger challenge regarding file size: most email deployment vendors give us a file size limit for the total packet of files for the email; this is often around 150-500 kb. Most animated gifs are many times larger than that.
So, for these reasons, I recommend simply avoiding animated gifs in email, period.
An example of what not to do
A few years ago while I was working at a digital ad agency, I received a holiday email greeting from one of the third-party tech partners we worked with — a big one. I opened the email in my Outlook and saw the vendor's logo, and a big light blue square below that, with snowflakes on it. And that was it. (Plus a paragraph of small text below that.)
I had a hunch I was looking at a gif that failed to animate, so I went and viewed the same email in webmail. This time I saw the snowflakes falling, and a nice holiday message appeared in a zig-zag wipe animation.
If this gif failed to animate for me, it certainly failed to animate for a large portion of the recipients of the email.
I also decided to download the gif file locally and check the file weight. It was 600 kb, which isn't terrible; that can load pretty fast. But if this email was to be sent by one of our typical deployment vendors, that 600 kb would exceed their normal file size limit by a lot.
So, as a tech director, all of this definitely influenced the way I felt about this tech company, and how digitally savvy they really are. Do thy really know emails? Did they even QA across platforms? Apparently not.
Anyway, I should also mention that this was before Windows released an updated version of Outlook that does allow animated gifs to play — but of course we should assume many users still have an older version! I check with people from time to time and I can confirm a lot of Windows/Outlook users still can't see animated gifs in email.
I periodically receive an email newsletter that has an animated gif as its header — there's static text in the header, and in the background there's a colorful, pulsing glow. A while back I noticed that the gif file loaded and popped into place with a huge delay, so I decided to download the file locally and take a look at it, just for fun(?). Although the header was displayed at 600 px wide, it was formatted at something like 2000 pixels wide, and the gif file weighed a whopping 9 megabytes! Meaning, clearly, it was exported by someone who just doesn't know much about emails or digital in general. This 9 mb gif would obliterate the kind of file size limit we typically work with, exceeding it many times over. For just a glowing header image.
Gif expertise
Animated gifs are a complicated beast, and if you're going to consider using them (in anything!) you should really make sure you understand all the basics about their formatting, color indexing, dithering, file size, etc. Someone who really knows gifs can look at a storyboard or even just hear about a concept for a gif and have a very good guess about whether the file size will be huge or relatively small. Several things factor into the file weight of a gif: dimensions, color palette, duration (i.e. number of frames), and complexity of imagery — flat colors and open spaces compress much smaller than busy imagery with lots of fine details. Text on a solid color compresses great. Photo/video compresses terribly. Etc etc etc. It's a very strange old technology that I really enjoy messing around with. You might too! If you're going to consider using gifs for anything I really recommend learning a lot about the format, so you're set up for success.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.