GIFs are versatile tools in email marketing, helping brands showcase products, promote events, and express their unique brand voice in a dynamic way. A well-designed GIF is an eye-catching focal point that encourages recipients to interact with your email.
We’re excited to share with you some of the best GIFs that convey ideas more effectively than static images.
Key takeaways
- Strategic storytelling: GIFs are powerful tools for adding visual appeal and brand personality to emails. Use them to effectively highlight product features, demonstrate how your product works, or generate excitement around special offers.
- Best practices for performance: To ensure a positive subscriber experience, limit your GIFs to no more than three frames per second and compress them before adding them to your email. We recommend using only one GIF per email to keep the message lightweight. For best performance, the optimal GIF size should be between 500 KB and 1 MB, which ensures smooth loading even for recipients with slower connections.
Examples of animated GIFs in emails
Each GIF in the following email campaigns serves a purpose — from demonstrating products and highlighting features to delivering playful event invitations or telling a story with animated text that might have been overlooked had the email contained only a simple text block.
1. Adidas
Adidas used email animations to show off their shoes’ colorways. This looks neat, simple, and awesome and shows that GIFs can save you lots of precious space in promo emails.
(Source: Email from Adidas)
2. Stripo
Animated GIFs in emails do more than just entertain recipients and catch their attention. For example, Stripo used a GIF to demonstrate how the Smart Elements feature speeds up email development.
(Source: Email from Stripo)
3. Ghirardelli
All product images necessary to your campaign can be consolidated into a single GIF, eliminating the need to create multiple large, bright banners. This approach keeps emails concise while showcasing a variety of visuals, such as these do-it-yourself gift ideas from Ghirardelli.
(Source: Email from Ghirardelli)
4. Chubbies
Chubbies always finds a way to stand out, even when demonstrating how to turn their new jackets inside out. A plain text description of reversible fleece jackets could never be as engaging as this stop-motion-style GIF, which instantly explains the jacket design to Chubbies’s recipients.
(Source: Email from Chubbies)
5. Forever 21
This GIF perfectly captures the thrill of Black Friday. By imitating a digital scratch card, the GIF reveals the brand’s discounts and encourages the email recipients to click through to view the full offer.
(Source: Email from Forever 21)
6. CB2
The furniture and home décor brand CB2 found a fun way to promote its services. It used an animated GIF in its email to highlight its offer of free shipping. The GIF is well-suited for email, and the funny dog surely made readers smile as they opened it.
(Source: Email from CB2)
7. Quartz
Do you like reading? Quartz ensured you could see its book’s content as soon as you open their email! Take a quick look at the book’s layout and artwork.
Important: If the animation were a bit slower, the GIF would have been even more effective, as it would have let recipients appreciate the design and typography choices.
(Source: Email from Quartz)
8. Monica Vinader
While videos are proven to increase conversion rate, they often take more time and resources to produce than static images. Monica Vinader found a simple alternative: a two-frame GIF that shows both its bracelet alone and how the bracelet looks on a model’s hand.
(Source: Email from Monica Vinader)
9. Alit
Alit demonstrated a clever way to introduce their new wine: including a GIF featuring animated text in their emails. Without this GIF, the product description would have been dull, and Alit’s subscribers might have missed the brand’s unique message.
This is a great reminder that animated text works perfectly for short intros or simple manuals.
(Source: Email from Alit)
10. Loft
Loft adopted a playful approach to email marketing by hiding its discount within a promotional email. As the GIF plays, a curtain gradually opens to reveal the discount percentage but stops just before the number appears, prompting viewers to click through to find out more.
(Source: Pinterest)
11. Stripo
Our Halloween emails created in Stripo were designed to spark curiosity and excitement. The template features a strikingly spooky GIF, dark images of human figures, and links to the event page and location. The combination of purple and black evokes the way the world looks at dusk, while a textured, distorted font is used for the text in the GIF, giving it a haunting, eerie feel.
(Source: Stripo template)
12. Lyft
Lyft showcased its electric scooter via a GIF that captures its dynamic riding and maneuvering features. The GIF’s purpose isn’t just to show off how well the scooter handles movement — it’s meant to actually guide recipients in understanding the safety measures Lyft wants them to follow.
(Source: Email from Lyft)
13. Everlane
Everlane used a bold, minimalistic GIF to highlight its sustainability efforts. Large words appear gradually to share a single fact: “One million new plastic bottles will be made by the time you finish reading this email.” This makes the scale of plastic bottle use immediately clear. If this had just been a static text block, the message wouldn’t be nearly as powerful.
(Source: Email from Everlane)
14. Charity Water
Charity Water used a GIF as a video thumbnail in this email, ensuring recipients would notice it and click through to view its how-to video.
(Source: Email from Charity Water)
Important: Stripo lets you add any custom thumbnail images to your videos. Please refer to the blog post given below for a manual.
15. Chubbies
The clothing brand used this animated email to draw customers’ attention to their huge sales. This cute GIF shows money pouring from a happy, smiling cloud — a playful nod to savings for shoppers (or maybe just money pouring into Chubbies’ pockets) as prices drop.
(Source: Email from Chubbies)
Requirements and recommendations for GIFs in emails
Here are a few technical requirements and best practices to keep in mind to ensure that your GIFs work in emails.
Size
The optimal file size for GIF in emails ranges from 500 KB to 1 MB. Larger GIFs can take longer to load, so it’s recommended to compress your file before adding it to your email.
Speed
Don’t make your animated GIFs too fast — they should play at three frames per second at most. Rapidly flashing patterns can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy or undiagnosed conditions.
Important: It’s not necessary to animate an entire banner. You can bring just a few elements to life, and the GIF will still look beautiful.
(Source: Email from Harry’s)
Number of GIFs
Don’t use more than one animated GIF in your emails:
- avoid causing discomfort for photosensitive recipients;
- keep the email lightweight and fast-loading;
- some versions of Outlook don’t fully support GIFs. If an email contains more than three GIFs, Outlook may not animate each GIF automatically and instead show only the first frame with a play button.
GIFs work best when they highlight a single idea or primary feature. If your goal is to drive sales, use GIFs to showcase the product’s key advantage. Building brand awareness or loyalty? Leverage GIFs to demonstrate your brand’s personality and values. Animated text, motion graphics, or sequences highlighting your product’s origins or ethical practices can convey what makes your brand unique and memorable.
Alt text
Some recipients deliberately disable the display of images and GIFs in their emails, and some may have slow internet. As a result, they won’t see the GIF itself but just its alt text — if available. This text should accurately and concisely describe the image’s content.
Adding alt text is also crucial for email accessibility. Most email builders or email marketing software allow you to easily include alt text in your GIF.
The first frame is the key one
Because certain email clients don’t fully support GIFs and display only the first frame as a static image, it’s important to ensure that this first frame conveys the main idea of your email campaign.
Email clients that have support for GIFs
Most modern email clients support GIF images. There are a few exceptions, however: Microsoft Outlook 2007-2016 and Windows Phone 7 do not display animations and instead show only the first frame of the GIF. Keep this in mind when designing your GIFs.
Here’s the list of email clients that support animated GIFs:
Desktop clients
- Lotus Notes (6, 7, 8);
- Outlook 2000-2003;
- Outlook for Mac;
- Apple Mail;
- Windows 10 Mall;
- Outlook 365.
Webmail clients
- Gmail;
- G Suite;
- Yahoo Mail;
- AOL;
- Outlook.com.
Mobile clients
- iOS Mail;
- Android (native);
- Android (Gmail);
- Blackberry.
Wrapping up
Animated sequences provide your emails a sense of scale, texture, or design that plain images can’t convey. Here’s what they can do:
- highlight your product from every perspective or display its features and versatility;
- demonstrate how your product works or how its new features can be used;
- showcase your brand values, personality, or sustainability efforts in a visually appealing way;
- tease discounts, sales, or special offers in a playful, interactive manner;
- add personality and fun to your emails, making them memorable and engaging.
We hope our compilation of animated GIFs and recommendations on how to use them in emails will help you reach new milestones. Get creative and leave a lasting impression with your email marketing campaigns!