Today, I’m going to be explaining how to create and add animated gifs to emails.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably sent out an email newsletter and it can be a struggle to make them look exciting and interesting to read. So today, I’m going to give you a little tip to show you how you can add animated gifs to your email newsletters to make them just that little more exciting.
Watch the video:
I’ve just animated this gif in a sales email that I’m sending out for The Recipe for SEO Success eCourse. And the reason I’ve used it is because I’m talking about a video that I have that is on the home page of that site. And also, it adds a bit of visual interest into an otherwise static email.
So that’s what we’re going to do but obviously you can also use these little animated gifs in blog posts as well.
So what do we use to make these? We use a tool called Giphy and this is giphy.com. You just click the create button at the top and you’ll be brought to this page here. All you need to do now is find a YouTube video, it can be a YouTube video of your own or one that you like online, or you can use a Vimeo video or a vine link and just pop them in here.
So I’m going to use one of the videos from my Youtube channel. I can pick anyone here.
Let’s pick this one and we’ll just take the URL from the top. We go back into Giphy and we drop the URL in here and then what happens is Giphy will load the video into its player and you can see it’s starting to play here.
You can then decide how long you want your gif to be and which bits of the video you want to capture. So I don’t want to capture this bit here, I want to capture some of my head so I’m going to move it up here so you can see it’s starting to record. And what it will do is it will show you how much is turning into gif. And you can make the gif longer or shorter so the longer it is, the bigger the file will be but also the more realistic it will look, it will look like a little video is actually playing.
So I tend to go around 4 seconds – I don’t know why, that just seems good for me. You can add captions. If you do, they will appear at the bottom of the gif and you can change the colour and the text of those. There’s limited options but there’s a few options there. And then you can tag this so you can find it for the future or other people could find it and use it, if they want to have a weird gif of me talking then there they have it. And then you’ve got a little button here.
There’s your URL there. You’ve got a button here. Just press create gif and Giphy will go ahead and turn that into an animated gif you can then use.
And here we are – here’s my little gif animating away so that’s perfect.
I can share this on Facebook, or Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram – whatever I want to. And I also have a little iframe here so I can actually embed this.
If I take this code here, I can pop this into a blog post. Just make sure that you’re in the coding tab of your blog post rather than the text tab.
You can just drop that in. Now you can also get links to the actual Giphy links, there’s an html5? video version, you can download the gif, you can upload the gif to Twitter. Lots of different options there. You can also create a little shorter version of the Giphy link as well.
But what we want to do is we want to actually drop this into our Mailchimp emails – So I use Mailchimp for my emails. And I’ll include a link in the notes with this video on a help document that will help you do this.
So here’s the document that Mailchimp has that explains it.
I’m just going to show you this in real life.
So we’ve already got one in here and we want to add another one. We can either add another image or you can just duplicate this little box. Here we go, now we’ve got me twice – how terrifying! And we also want to replace this animated gif. So we click on replace and then we can do a couple of things. One thing we can do is go up here and click import from Giphy. And what it will do is look for all the gifs in Giphy and try and find your gif.
So if I type in Kate Toon, you will see the issue that I have is it’s not finding my Giphy and you’ll see that unfortunately the issue that you get is that because your gif is relatively new, it’s not coming up. Instead we have a lot of other strange things coming up so I want to get rid of that quickly.
Instead what I ended up doing was actually importing the gif from my desktop.
So what I did is I created a little gif. Here it is, you can see it here. And I put that on my desktop and then I simply uploaded that gif from my desktop. So just simply dragged it on, there we go it’s been dragged on and there it is and I can select that and it will drop in.
So I’ve got two. Now if I want to maybe use that other gif that I created, I just go to this area here. I’ll download it again to my desktop and then I’ll go back to my emails. I’ll replace, I’ll find that document – that gif that I created that I want to download – drop it on and once it’s there, you can see there it is. I can select it and now this gif is there as well.
And it’s that simple and then what you can do is you can send a test of that email to yourself and make sure that it is animating. And that’s it, it’s that simple and obviously what you can do is you can use this little tool to create gifs whenever you want, to use in your own blogs. And obviously therefore what you can do is use this great little tool to create your own gifs for whatever you want – for blog posts, for social media, for Instagram – that are actually personalised to you.
So I hope that was helpful, a little video on how to use animated gifs in your Mailchimp emails and also for blogs as well. And I’ll include links to all the tools I’ve mentioned today in the notes for this video on the website at www.copywritingschool.com.au. Thanks for watching!
