As an email marketer, I’m constantly opening personal emails I receive to see what other companies are experimenting with in email marketing.

While animated gifs aren’t new, I love when I see companies experimenting with gifs in their emails. Does the click thru rate increase with the addition of a carefully placed animated gif? Does it capture the readers’ attention more so than a static image? What is the percentage of viewers that can’t see the gif at all due to browser issues or slow loading times? Are there higher rates of deliverability issues to any of the email providers with the introduction of gifs?

Some of my favorite animated gifs from the past few years are below. Some of the companies that have been actively experimenting with animated gifs in their email marketing include Best Buy, Caesars Entertainment, and Benefit Cosmetics.

Ways to Incorporate Animated Gifs in your Email Marketing

Travel/Tourism:

• Subtle introductions such as waves crashing or a flag blowing in the wind that can help invoke an emotion in  your reader
• Subtle Call to Action button – limited time offer blinking stripe across the corner of the page, a peel back that says view more
• Action shots of people walking in to a destination, eating, dancing, a child jumping into a pool and making a splash
• A menu flipping open, a door opening up (perhaps for home rental emails like airbnb or homeaway or a hotel email), a light turning on, someone falling onto a comfortable bed
• Holiday inspired animated gifs — blinking Christmas lights framing a page, snow falling down the page, champagne glasses toasting for New Years Eve, or a heart being drawn/appearing for Valentine’s Day

Making Gifs for Email Marketing

While the standard rules apply for making animated gifs for email marketing purposes, there are also a few apps that may allow you to capture a moment – such as a glass of wine being poured – via your phone and export as a gif for use in your loyalty marketing efforts. One of the apps that can be used is GifBoom, an app that takes a short video of an action and saves it as a gif, or flixel, an app that allows you take a video and turn it into a partially animated gif, an easy way to introduce cinemagraph elements into your marketing.

**Cinemagraphs are animated gifs that are combined in a way to look like the viewer is watching a movie. In the case of someo of the above examples, such as a glass of wine being poured or a person falling into a bed, those would be examples of cinemagraphs.

On to the Examples of Animated Gifs and Cinemagraphs

Animated Gif Header in Email by Benefit Cosmetics
Link

Full Email Image (static)

New York and Company

Appearing Images Gif

*Gif image only rotates once, so you may need to refresh to see full image cycle

Best Buy Animated Email
Subtle Header Movement
Animated Gif Image

Full Email (Static)

Caesars Entertainment

Animated Fireworks

4th of JulyEmail Offer

Newegg.com Animated Email

Use of animated gif: Flashing call to action (Enter the Sale)

Static Email Image

Honorary mentions:
Here are a few more sites to take a look at for some examples of cinemagraphs and animated gifs used for marketing purposes:

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/cinemagraph/

Beer making process

This post is actually for myself. I use a combination of Evernote, Google Drive, and bookmarks to remember all my favorite sites, but with new favorite sites being found every day, they sometimes gets lost.

As of December 2012, here are a few of my favorite things that help me make my job easier:

SnagIt

SnagIt is still one of my favorite purchases ever. Makes it easier to edit images quickly for banner resizes, send cropped and edited screenshots, and create quick mock wireframes.

PicMonkey

A new find via the Google Chrome store, PicMonkey makes it easy to create photo collages for email templates (new slots, round-up of Instagram photos for a newsletter), header images (as seen on my site), Facebook cover photos, and more.

Evernote and/or Google Drive

I used to be a die-hard Evernote fan for keeping my Standard Operating Procedures, passwords, and notes in one place, but Google Drive is slowly becoming my go-to.

Dropbox

I just became a Dropbox fan recently. My personal site crashed and I didn’t have a back-up, so I’m starting over. Lesson learned, though I should have known better, and I do back up all my other business sites. I use the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin which has worked out great.

Asana

Hello, lifesaver. I started using Asana when I was a team of one at MGM Grand Detroit and my moleskin notebook organizational skills were being tested, along with my memory. I started using Asana as my project management tool, and it’s come in handy as my team has grown and “memory” is no longer an acceptable method of keeping track of tasks and longer term projects. It’s a site I log on to Sunday nights and QA for deadlines, then update daily as new tasks come up. Assigning tasks and due dates and the capability to order by project, assignee, or due date make this app one of my favorite things.

iPhone Apps:

PicFrame

Thanks to @hmacdonald for pointing this app out to me. It’s a bit nicer than PicStitch and has font editing capabilities and some of the same features as PicMonkey.

Snapseed

An amazing photo editing app. Use this before posting to Instagram to give iPhone images an extra pop.