GIFs Can Boost Your Brand’s Email Open Rates
Is it GIF or JIF? By now everyone know it's GIF. GIFs have spread beyond Reddit and Tumblr and into mainstream marketing, and for good reason. They're highly effective at achieving the goals every marketer wants: Better open rates, more views, and higher conversions. And not to mention, people love them!
Email marketers can especially benefit from adding GIFs to their campaigns. We'll cover exactly what you need to know about using GIFs to make your email marketing more convincing — and more fun — than ever before.
What is a GIF?
A GIF, or graphics interchange format, is a way to format static or animated image files into a short clip of moving images. They are typically five seconds long or so and often humorous as well as captioned.
What makes GIFs so darn good?
To say GIFs are wildly popular is to understate the phenomenon.
Fun fact: Almost 23 million GIFs are posted to Tumblr each day.
According to Mike Isaac at The New York Times, “[GIFs] have become a mainstream form of digital expression, a way to relay complex feelings and thoughts in ways beyond words and even photographs, making them hugely popular with young audiences who never leave home without their smartphones.”
Mike Isaac nails it – there’s an emotional component to a great GIF that mainlines sentiment straight through to the cerebral cortex. If you want someone to feel excited about your email offer, something like this could be your fast track:
Use GIFs to drive engagement and connections
Email marketers are always on the lookout for ways to set their emails apart from the rest of the inbox. It’s a three-fold challenge: You need to get noticed, get clicks, and get conversions. That's no small task. Luckily, animated GIFs might just be the bit o’ magic you’re looking for.
Social media marketers have been using GIFs to boost social engagement for years, but it isn’t a leap to see how GIFs could also liven up email marketing. Even if your email marketing needs to feature your products instead of someone else's dog.
DiGiorno isn’t alone. Women’s clothing retailer Ann Taylor LOFT used an animated present GIF to entice subscribers to click through to “unwrap” their gift, and adding just a little motion surprised readers into doing just that. (For some truly outstanding examples of email GIFing, check these out.)
Get personal with GIFs
More and more, email marketers seek to make personal connections with users to drive up engagement and customer loyalty. And that means emails have to be more than “Sale!” or “Check out our new feature!” They need to act like real communications between human beings (crazy, I know). That’s why email marketing best practices recommend sending emails from personal addresses rather than a do-not-reply mass email address.
Consider how much more personal and compelling it would be to open an email and see the founder featured in a GIF. Or the marketing team excitedly opening the boxes of brand new products. You don’t have to make a huge production out of it. When in doubt, ask yourself: What would Fido do?
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