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Chris_Saporito
Chris_Saporito
New Participant
October 24, 2016
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GIF Email - Inbox Placement Low

  • October 24, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 6252 views

We used a GIF in an email for the first time today. We have been seeing great inbox placement recently in the high 90's. With this GIF email we saw inbox placement around 70% as well as very low responses. Has anyone run into this issue before with GIFs? Any insight is appreciated!

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    Best answer by Dan_Stevens_

    Are you referring to an email that contains a single GIF image to represent the entire email content?  If so, this can cause a variety of issues, including:

    • Any user who doesn't have their images turned on will not be able to see the email.
    • Some spam filters will determine the likelihood of spam based on a "images-to-content" ratio.  If this is high, there's a good chance it will look like it was delivered, but never made it to the person's inbox.
    • Non-responsiveness on mobile devices
    • Obvious accessibility issues.

    2 replies

    Carmi_Lopez-Jo1
    Carmi_Lopez-Jo1
    New Participant
    October 25, 2016

    Hi Chris.  I say ditto to all the previous posters remarks, but would add this:  (from our friends at Litmus:  A Guide to Animated GIFs In Email)

    • Newer versions of Outlook (2007, 2010 and 2013) won’t show the animation. Instead, they will show the first frame of the animation. 
    • Also, animated GIFs are prone to excessive file sizes. In an increasingly mobile world, file size can play an important part in any email program. Extremely large GIFs both cut into subscribers’ data plans and can be slow to load and play—both of which are frustrations that no audience should have to deal with.

    The Litmus resource has some great intel.  Hope it helps.

    Carmi López-Jones

    Senior Deliverability Consultant

    Marketo

      Dan_Stevens_
      Dan_Stevens_Accepted solution
      New Participant
      October 24, 2016

      Are you referring to an email that contains a single GIF image to represent the entire email content?  If so, this can cause a variety of issues, including:

      • Any user who doesn't have their images turned on will not be able to see the email.
      • Some spam filters will determine the likelihood of spam based on a "images-to-content" ratio.  If this is high, there's a good chance it will look like it was delivered, but never made it to the person's inbox.
      • Non-responsiveness on mobile devices
      • Obvious accessibility issues.
        Chris_Saporito
        Chris_SaporitoAuthor
        New Participant
        October 24, 2016

        Thanks Dan. We have a single GIF image as the main body of the email with an additional non-GIF image as the second piece. Definitely an image heavy email which like you said is probably raising red flags. Just started using Marketo's email deliverability powerpack so I'm not very confident in breakdown the inbox informant results yet.

        Robb_Barrett
        Robb_Barrett
        New Participant
        October 25, 2016

        I hope you're also creating a Text Only version of the email and putting in some invisible text or your Watch users will never see your emails.

        You're also jacking up your spam score with image only.  You want a 60/40 text to image ratio (based on file size) to keep your spam score low.

        Robb Barrett
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