We would start by defining some terms : Marketing, Email Marketing and Gifs.
Marketing is a management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer. This involves having a product at a price, deciding a place (ie a channel through which the product gets to the customers) and developing promotional strategy.
Email marketing is a way to reach consumers directly via email.
Gif is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format. Gif was introduced in 1987 by Steve Wilhite of Compuserve as a new way to present a moving image. Ever since Gifs have been in use, but suddenly became very popular after Twitter introduced gif keyboard for its social media. Later in 2016 Facebook did same and Tumblr too. In 2015 about a 100 million Gifs were made through tweets and direct messaging. About 23 million Gifs are posted on Tumblr everyday and over 5 million gifs on Facebook messenger daily. This is how popular gifs have gotten in the past few years.
The aim of every marketing campaign is to eventually get customers to have the product marketed and possibly more products from the brand doing the marketing. Digital marketers try every possible means to carry out effective marketing campaigns and gifs have been a very effective tool. Gifs are used for social media marketing and email marketing especially.
You may wonder why gifs. Well, Dell after using gifs in email marketing for a whole year recorded 6 percent increase in mail open rate, 42 percent increase in clicks, 103 percent increase in conversion rate and 109 percent increase in revenue. This data of course shows that gifs can be used to improve email marketing success.
Gifs have been this productive because :
1. Gifs are better than images and cheaper than video : Reports have it that people only remember 20 percent of text without visuals. There is a prediction that by 2018, 84 percent of communication would be visual. Gifs are visuals, just like images and video. And videos record greater successes than just images, because sometimes images may be misunderstood. Gifs have motions like videos too, is mobile friendly and can be easily understood. There are cheaper than videos and work just as good as videos.
2. Gifs are easy to consume : It takes only a few seconds to consume gifs.
3. Gifs are mobile friendly : It can be viewed in just about any device. This helps in the sharability and it doesn't consume much data.
4. Gifs tell memorable stories : Gifs can be used in telling powerful and compelling stories that would help you make your desired conversions and the stories can be committed to memory afterall the stories would be told in few seconds.
5. You can use gifs to explain a process and highlight benefits and features of a product or a service.
To use gifs please avoid -
1. An over use of gifs : Don't use gifs too much cos it may become boring and you may run out of ideas.
2. Use in the right context : Don't try too hard to use gifs, use only in the right context. If you and your team can't create the right gifs for a marketing campaign, don't bother. It's best you don't use gifs at all than use gifs that won't be of any use, just because it's not used in the right context.
Wondering how to make Gifs There are quite a lot of tools that can help you make Gifs. There are quite a lot of sites. You can visit some of the sites and get already made gifs that suits your purpose or you can create your own gifs which is preferable. You can also do a gif contest on your social media platforms. The winning gifs can be used in your email marketing afterwards.
Note that to have email marketing successful your email would have to be personal, conversational, and shouldn't appear like an attempt to sell or convince the receiver to make purchases. You should sell solutions through your email marketing campaign and not your product exactly.
One other challenge for email marketing is building contacts, while you may be tempted to buy contacts, you are advised to make your own contacts, and the easiest way to get contacts is to give your customers freebies in exchange for their emails. You can offer free ebooks or reviews of what you sell or anything you are sure your consumers would want to have, and this is in exchange for their email addresses.
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