How to prepare a gif animated banner on email signatures

If you're reading this article, you might have prepared a nice gif animated banner for your email signature. Great idea. Here are 3 tips to help you take advantage of this format.

make sure contact can read it
Optimise file size
Stay focus on the expected result

1. Deliverability : will my animation display correctly?

This is the first question you have to ask yourself. The answer depends on your contact messaging service.

If your contact (the receiver) opens the email from Gmail, Mail (mac), Airmail, Spark, Thunderbird, Polymail, Canary... YES, good news, your gif animated picture will be displayed. No worries, you can pursue to 2nd step : optimise file size.
If your contact opens the email from Outlook, the animation will NOT DISPLAY. Outlook does not display animated graphics. Your contact will only see a static image appears. It is important to forecast this case. To go over this restriction, prepare the first frame of your animation, like it is the only one displayed. Directly insert the message and your call to action in this frame, to maximise the impact and deliveralibity.

2. File size: is the animation going to start directly?

Good question. Gif animated graphics are size-guzzler: their large size make it load slowly. To maximise chance to be well displayed on the messaging service of your contact when he opens the, make sure to minimise it's size (Ko).

Here is a list of tips to improve your file size :

Make it short (limit duration and frame number).
Test various compression option,
Limit the number of colour displayed.
Use flat color rather than gradients or big pictures

Verify if the size of you GIF is (really) lighter than 1Mo.

3. Stay focus on your goal

Before deploying an animated banner on email signatures, make sure it helps reach the goal you are aimed at. Is it just a corporate message without action required? Or do you want the receiver to clic and go further, discover your content?

Here are two advices :

Message and call to action must remain very simple. Design must deserve the message.
Define if animation ease and clarify the purpose. Or if a static graphic (.jpg / .png) with a call to action is enough.

Cheers,

Sigilium team.

Any doubt or question? Our team is available to help you, call us: at +33 1 83 64 02 13 / contact@sigilium.com