GIFs in Email

[Anonymous]

Hello - I wanted to see if anyone knew of any limitations to using GIFs in Marketo emails? I had uploaded a GIF in the Design Studio and uploaded the image to the email. I was able to view the GIF just fine on a MAC, but was unable to see it on a PC.

Thanks,

Matt

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

Hey,

I believe by GIF you meant animated GIF? That is the issue on the client side, not Marketo. Some email clients (like Outlook for Windows) don't support animated GIFs. Check out this post for more info: A Guide to Animated GIFs In Email

Best;m

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Matjaz! I had thought that may be the case. Thanks for sharing.

[Chris_Saporito]

Hi Matthew,

Yes, you can use GIFs in emails. A couple of things to be careful of with these is that they can cause inbox placement to be low and they don't work well with Outlook.

See my post from a while back to find out about some more limitations: GIF Email - Inbox Placement Low

There are quite a few Community posts about this, I just searched "GIF" to find them!

Best of Luck,

Chris

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Chris! I will look into those a bit more. I saw your posting yesterday, some good tips to keep in mind.

[Adam_Pereyra]

Matthew,

We recently sent out an animated GIF as an email header on one of our emails. We came across the same issue you are having in regards to the GIF not rendering (animating) on all devices and OS. Our solution was to not host it in Marketo but instead host the GIF on our servers and link to the GIF like you would an image. After doing that, we had no issues getting the GIF to animate across the board.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Adam. I will give that a try, seems like a good solution.

[SanfordWhiteman]

link to the GIF like you would an image.

That's the only way you ever embed a GIF in Marketo, as the remote src of an <img> tag.

after doing that, we had no issues getting the GIF to animate across the board.

Extremely doubtful: a web host is a web host, and the client app doesn't distinguish between hosts when deciding.whether to animate a GIF. The versions of Outlook that don't animate GIFs don't care where they're hosted.

It sounds like you didn't retest adequately.

[Adam_Pereyra]

Sanford,

We had a really hard time with the Marketo templates and hosting images in Marketo. Not sure if it had to do with the way the templates were coded or what as I am not an HTML coding expert. All I know is that we had more success with images and, especially, GIFs when they were not hosted in Marketo.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You didn't solve the incompatibility of Outlook with animated GIFs by re-hosting images. This is a profusely-documented restriction of Outlook, and the people who do the deepest possible testing of such things (Litmus, CampaignMonitor, dedicated providers of animated GIF-based countdown clocks) all agree: there is no support possible.