Add GIFs to Emails

Advantages

Incorporating GIFs into an email campaign can offer several advantages:

Visual Appeal: GIFs add a dynamic and engaging element to your emails, making them more visually attractive.
Increased Engagement: The motion in GIFs can catch the reader's attention and potentially lead to increased engagement rates, as recipients may be more inclined to pay attention to your message.
Convey Emotion: GIFs can effectively convey emotions or reactions, adding a human touch to your emails that plain text or static images cannot match.
Explain Concepts: Complex ideas or products can be illustrated more clearly using GIFs. These quickly show how something works without requiring the recipient to leave the email.

Consider the following methods while adding GIFs to your emails:

GIF Drag and Drop: You can source GIFs from platforms like Giphy and conveniently search them on MoEngage GIFs after dragging and dropping.
Image block usage: Alternatively, you can utilize the image block and provide the GIF's URL for insertion.

Incorporating GIFs in email communications demands careful consideration of the following key factors:

GIF aspect ratio and size: The GIF's aspect ratio and dimensions must be selected precisely. Oversized images may not load adequately.
Loading speed and subscriber engagement: The speed at which your email and its contents load is crucial. Slower loading times can reduce your recipients' engagement.
File size: Although no universal threshold exists for the maximum GIF size in an email, larger files take longer to load. Aim for GIFs under 200 KB to ensure smoother loading, especially for mobile users.
Mobile network considerations: Given that most users access emails on their smartphones, it's essential to account for varying mobile network speeds, even though many can connect to Wi-Fi.
Overall email size: Emails must ideally stay within the 100 KB range, with a maximum limit of 110 KB. Exceeding this limit, especially in Gmail, results in message clipping. Note that the media size does not significantly contribute to the email size; the HTML code and wrapped links affect it.
Recommended image size: For images, it is recommended to use an image size below 500 KB. Since GIFs often have larger file sizes, it's wise to set an upper limit of around 800 KB.
Acceptable Download Speeds: Ensure that your email's content, including GIFs, loads swiftly on different connections:
- 3G connection: Less than 4 seconds
- 4G connection: Less than 3 seconds
- LTE connection: Less than 2.5 seconds
- Desktop connection: Less than 2 seconds