MHAnimated Gifs increasing file size and best practices?
This holiday season, I've been seeing more and more animated gifs in emails. Everything I've read recommends no more that 400 KB for best practices, and some ESPs say not over 250 KB. I would love to hear what other people are using and any results.
In Theory (based best practices advice):
• Keep your file size under 400 KB.
• Keep your image size under 480 pixels in width and height.
• Keep the number of frames under ten.
• Put your most important frame first, to ensure Outlook 2007 and 2010 users don't miss the message. (Outlook 2007 and 2010 will only display the first frame in an animated GIF)
In Practice (These are some of the file sizes I've seen in competitor's emails.):
Ann Taylor keeps theirs at 400KB or less
America Apparel's are 200 - 700KB
Sephora mostly under 400KB
Brooks Brothers 1.4MB
Bonobos 1.6MB
Smashbox 4.2MB (Seriously!?!)
From what I've read, the large emails should have gotten blocked by some email clients. The risk you run (most likely on mobile phones) is larger sized emails could force email platforms or devices to truncate a message or to block delivery entirely. My fear for my clients would be if their emails get blocked, it might negatively impact the integrity or their email list causing deliverability issues for future emails.
Personally, I have sent animated gifs at 700KB (via Responsys) and 900KB (via Blue Hornet) with no noticeable problems and open rates comparable to smaller emails, so far emails lists have not been negatively impacted.
My question is - How big is too big?
I'd love to hear any feedback and super excited about this Community forum! Thanks Litmus!!
Megan, as an update to this thread, we just published a guide to animated GIFs that may help you out. It's up on our blog:
https://litmus.com/blog/a-guide-to-animated-gifs-in-email
Maybe the "read in your browser" option could really help here, as you could have the heavy gif images and HD ones load only when people click the link, while you would keep only static and safe images on the email sent out. Considering people read most of their emails on phones you could save their precious time, all in all it's all about knowing your users, if you know most people are on desktops and areas where internet isn't slow you could be fine with heavier emails, but I wouldn't push myself as far as 4MB, I think 1-2MB should really be the limit
Wow 4.2MB, I've always used 70kb as my rough guide but I've been using that for a while so it may well be outdated now. But generally I say the smaller the better.
As well as deliverability think about usability. People are impatient and will only wait a few seconds for an image to load and that could take a while if they are on a slow 3G connection. Load times are a big deal on websites at the moment and should be for emails too.
Also have you considered CSS animation, supported in iOS, Apple mail, Outlook 2011, Thunderbird and now Android, for us that's over half of our opens. It should add up to a smaller file size and you can do some very cool effects with it.
I've got no answer I'm afraid just a few thoughts.