Marketing With Cinemagraphs And Animated GIFs

For artists, keeping up with digital marketing trends is important when it comes to getting the attention of fans both old and new. Here we look at how GIFs and Cinegraphs can be made and integrated into email and other forms of social media.

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Guest Post from the FanBridge Blog

Earlier this month, we talked about the social media marketing trends we see on the horizon for 2016. This is important to keep in mind as we discuss how it affects email marketing in 2016. Email and social go hand in hand, so we’re going to walk through some of these social trends and tell you how you can use these ideas for email as well.

INFOGRAPHIC: 2016 Social Marketing Trends

Animated GIFs & Cinemagraphs

As we mentioned before, marketing is becoming increasingly visual, which includes increasing usage of animated GIFs and cinemagraphs. Use of animated GIFs in emails saw a 26% higher click through rate! If that’s not reason enough, we don’t know what is.

What is a Cinemagraph?

A cinemagraph is a type of animated GIF, except only a portion of the photo is actually animated. Check out this incredible example (which was used in an email campaign) from Mr. Porter:

As you can see, the man’s hand and glass are moving, the flame is flickering, but nothing else. Not even a shadow moves in the rest of the photo. Cinemagraphs, while more subtle than a fully animated GIF, demand more attention from the viewer to figure out what they’re looking at. Your eye is immediately drawn to the swirling glass. Behind the glass is the jacket for sale.

How do I Make a Cinemagraph or an Animated GIF?

There are a lot of great online resources to create a GIF. You should already have a video file ready to convert, and then you can use a tool like giphy or ezgif to convert the file and optimize it.

For a cinemagraph, there are less tools available, and it’s a bit more technical. First, you’ll need to make sure that the video you’re converting has been recorded on a tripod. If you don’t, your cinemagraph might come out like this:

Cinemagraph Pro is an excellent tool to use once you’ve recorded your video. Simply add the file, then use the mask function to select which parts of the video should remain moving.

As you can see, the results can be quite stunning:

How do I add these in an email?

You can add an animated GIF the same way you add a photo to the email campaign! A few things to keep in mind:

Make sure the file format is .gif
The file must be less than 2MB in size
An email is only 600px wide, so no need to make your GIF any larger than that

How should I use a GIF or Cinemagraph in an email?

Any movement in an email campaign will draw the eye. The question is, what do you want the eye drawn to? The obvious answer is that you’d like the reader to click through to another page where they consume content, or perhaps make a purchase. Your GIF should be in support of that action. Here’s some of our favorite examples: