Animated GIFs in email: when the movement is worth the weight

What a GIF can show that a photograph can't

Movement earns its place when it answers a question a still photo can't. How does it fold? What does the zip look like done up? Which colours does it come in? A few seconds of loop answers that faster than a paragraph.

• A product in use: a lid clicking shut, a jacket zipping up
• Colourways cycling, one frame per colour
• A before and after, for anything that cleans, fixes or tidies
• A countdown timer, which is a GIF a third party tool draws fresh each time the email's opened

Frame one, file weight and the Outlook problem

Some older versions of Outlook on Windows only show the first frame. So frame one has to work on its own: the product, clearly, nothing caught mid-move. If your offer only appears in frame four, some of your readers never see it.

Then there's weight. Every frame is another picture, so a long loop at full width gets heavy fast, and a heavy file is a blank box on mobile data while it loads. Klaviyo compresses most images when you upload them, but not GIFs, so the weight's on you. Cut frames until it looks worse, then put one back.

When to leave the GIF out of the email

Sparkles, spinning logos, anything that moves because it can. Movement pulls the eye, so a decorative GIF drags attention away from the thing you want clicked.

Skip anything that flashes fast, too. Rapid flashing is an accessibility problem, and for people with photosensitive epilepsy it can be a health one. Keep the words in live text beside the GIF, give it alt text, and test it against a still image on clicks before it becomes a habit.