GIF Email - Inbox Placement Low

[Chris_Saporito]

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!

[Dan_Stevens_ · Accepted solution]

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]

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]

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.

• https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-development/does_text_to_image_ratio_affect_deliverab...
• Spam Filters and How to Avoid Them

[Chris_Saporito]

Thanks Robb Barrett PRD​ I did have a Text Only version. We did a split for this send so I'm going to adjust the text and try to change the ratio before sending the next batch. Those articles are great, thanks for sending!

[Carmi_Lopez-Jo1]

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