Creating and Optimizing Animated GIFs for Email
- Updated on: 2017-08-07
- Read original article here
An animated GIF is a great way to bring some life to your emails. To delight your readers with something fun. Because video in email is still not supported in every email client, animated GIFs are a great alternative if you want to add moving content to your emails. But as with many things in email, creating animated GIFs specifically for email requires a few thoughtful considerations.
In this post, we partnered with an awesome email geek, Jaina Mistry to walk through the process of creating and optimizing animated GIFs for your email campaigns. Plus you’ll learn why they’re a perfect alternative to video in your emails.
A GIF is an image file, like a JPG or PNG, but a GIF can contain animation. The animation type can vary from scenes cut from videos to slideshow style animation featuring multiple still frames of different images.
Animated GIFs have risen in popularity on the internet. They’re everywhere from social media to news websites, thanks to websites like giphy. In email marketing, it’s now not uncommon to see some animation in email content. More than likely, this animation will be an animated GIF.
Campaign Monitor customers have been using animated GIFs in their emails with great success. Check out this slick example from jeweler, Monica Vinader:
Animated GIFs can be created using a variety of different types of software. Here we’ll talk about the one you’re more likely to be aware of and used to – Adobe Photoshop.
With Adobe Photoshop, you can create animated GIFs in some different ways including frame-by-frame animation and by importing a video.
Frame-by-frame animation is great if you’d like to cycle through a handful of products, or if you want to create an animation that only has a small number movements.
First, create your file that you want to animate in a frame-by-frame style. Create a new layer in the layer palette for each frame you want to be animated.
Under “Window” in your toolbar, select the “Timeline” window.
When you have Timeline selected, you’ll see an extra window at the bottom of your screen showing you a timeline. Hit the “Create Frame Animation” button in this section and you’ll see your first frame ready for some animation.
Now you can duplicate frames and populate each frame by switching layers on and off in your layer palette.
Importing video frames is a popular method of creating an animated GIF from a video file you already have.
Simply go to File > Import > Video Frames to Layers
You’ll then get to choose just how much of your video you want to turn into a GIF. We recommended that you limit your import to every 3 frames and choose a scene or clip from the video you’re importing. Then select the “Make frame animation” option.
You’ll see a Timeline appear at the bottom of your window showing you your clip in animation form, ready to be saved for use in your email.
If you’re feeling brave and sporting a little extra technical know-how with Adobe Photoshop there’s another option for creating animated GIFs using the Timeline feature. Dan Denney has a great tutorial on this method.
If you don’t have Adobe Photoshop there are other alternatives to creating your own animated GIFs for your campaigns:
The popular image hosting platform, Imgur has it’s own video to GIF converter available for free online – which is a great solution if you’re limited with your resources. However, with this tool you’ll be limited to converting just a 15-second clip of your video and the video must be hosted online on YouTube, Vimeo, or another video hosting platform.
Animated GIF file sizes can get rather large the more animation, frames and colors there are in the image. There are a few things you can do to help manage this:
1. Only animate what you need to animate The more moving parts there are in your image the larger the image file size will be when you eventually save it for your email. If you’re using Adobe Photoshop, only animate the layers that need to be animated.
2. Keep it small The larger the dimensions of the image you are creating are, the larger the file size will be too. So crop the image as much as possible to only the section you’re animating.
3. Keep it short The fewer the frames of animation, the shorter your GIF will be and the smaller your image file size will be. Big win. Remove unnecessary frames from your GIF as the human eye can’t detect the most minute movement, so removing every third frame from an imported video GIF is perfectly acceptable.
4. Don’t use every color under the sun The more colors there are in an animated GIF the higher the file size will be. Keep this in mind when you’re choosing what you’d like to animate.
When you’re happy that you’ve managed to do as much as you can in terms of optimizing your GIF’s animation before saving, dive right into saving.
In Adobe Photoshop go to File and then Save for Web, or hit the shortcut key CTRL-ALT-S.
Saving the image for web will further help to optimize the image by reducing the file size as much as possible while maintaining the quality.
In the top right-hand corner of the Save for Web window, you’ll see an option that says “Colors”. When you play around with this option, increasing or decreasing, you’ll notice changes in your GIF. Try to aim to get this number as small as possible, without sacrificing the quality of your animated GIF.
Further down in this top section you’ll see another option called “Lossy”. Increasing this will degrade the quality of your GIF but it’ll also decrease your file size. Like the “Colors” option, play around with this a little bit. See how high you can take this before your animated GIF doesn’t look so great anymore. You’ll begin to notice it getting increasingly “pixel-y” as you increase the number.
At the bottom of the “Save for Web” panel, you’ll see you can also control how many times your GIF will loop as well as previewing the animation. After you’ve adjusted the settings, such as Colors and Lossy, it’s a good idea to give the animation a quick look through just to make sure it all looks okay.
Now you may be wondering, when it comes to animated GIF image sizes, how big is too big? We’ve seen fantastic animations in large GIFs come in at under 1MB but also more complex ones over 10MB! Keep in mind your subscribers may be viewing your email on a mobile device. If your animated GIF is too large in size, it’ll take too long to fully load and your subscriber won’t even get to see your full animation.
It’s a good idea to keep the file size as close to 1MB as possible. Under is perfect. A little over is still okay too.
With the GIF being an old image file format created back in 1987, it’s a widely supported file format. However, the animated GIF doesn’t quite work everywhere. In Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013 and Windows Phone 7 only the first frame of your animated GIF will be shown. So be sure that any key information is in this first frame, and that your email will still look as great as it does with the animation as with just that first frame.
Animated GIFs work best in email campaigns when used sparingly. When you introduce them to your email campaigns your readers might get a real buzz out of them. But if you go on to use them in every single campaign, they may tire of them or get so used to them they forget they’re there. Keep the animated GIFs special – only use them when they add value.
You also don’t want to overload one email with a ton of animated GIFs. Even if you’ve gone to great lengths of optimizing each one to and have the file sizes down to a respectable level, the more you add the longer all of them will take to load. Use one animated GIF to draw attention to a key area of your email.
The animated GIF has made a definite comeback. If you haven’t embraced it in your email campaigns, it’s about time you did. They’re a great alternative to video content and they’re widely supported. You may need to spend a bit of time to create the perfect animated GIF for your email campaigns, but they’re a great way to add an element of surprise and delight to your emails.
