What Is Animated GIF | GIF Example & Advantages of GIF

Gifs today have become an indispensable part of our social media conversations. Be it Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, or any other online messaging platform, no conversations are complete without using Gifs. These animated images can express the whole emotion during a conversation which cannot be expressed by a text message.

You all might have used or been using Gifs but most people never try to know and learn the different ways you can use Gifs. Gifs could be used in marketing and business to boost the attractiveness of your products.

So in this article we bring you all about Gifs, all your questions like What Are Gifs?, What are Different Kinds of Gifs?, How to Use Cool Gifs as Part of Your Marketing?, How to create animated custom Gifs? Which is the best gif template maker? And many more will be cleared after reading the whole article.

Part 1 What Is Animated GIF

01What Are Gifs?

To begin with, we will start by understanding what is a Gif. Gif stands for Graphics Interface Format and the kind of animation you use today has had a presence on the internet for more than 30 years as of now. A Gif named "flying airplane" was first created by Steve Wilhite and his team of developers in 1987 while working for Compuserve. At the time of their inception, Gifs were small-sized normal moving images placed on any kind of background.

The early Gifs came into use with the increase in popularity of social sharing websites like Geocities, Myspace, and later Imgur and Tumblr. Today we are using the most advanced versions of Gifs, these can be downloaded or embedded on your website, we can use them on almost every messaging platform and creating Gifs today has become a child's play.

02Different Kinds of Gifs

Now the question comes about what are different types of Gifs. After their creation, Gifs are now used for various purposes and hence then began a custom to define them according to their use.

● Reaction GIFs

These are the most widely used Gifs in social media and messaging platforms. You might have used them to comment to express your feelings. These help to convey your message by animation and you don't need to type all the stuff. reaction GIFs are bits and pieces of videos or movies looped into a GIF. Almost all the emotions and feelings like applause, happiness, sadness, etc can be expressed by them.

● Illustration and Cartoon Gifs

GIFs that were illustrated specifically to be turned into a GIF comes under this category. These are mostly used to explain something in simple visual form rather than typing all the stuff. Very attractive animation and bright colors are used here to make them seamless.

● Gif Art

You might have not noticed but Gifs can be used very efficiently to showcase art. Many digital artists use the .gif format to create cool GIFs of their own to present their art. On the Gif website like Giphy, you can find thousands of artistic Gifs.

● Optical illusion GIFs

These kinds of Gifs create an illusion to the human eyes and are very attractive. You can use them while the conversation with your friends for a fun purpose.

● Branded Gifs

You might have noticed, nowadays almost all the brands use cool Gifs to promote their products online. Out of all, the apparel brands have made use of this feature in a very wide spectrum to promote their sales.

● Cinemagraphs

These are very special kinds of animated images. These are normal moving images that are continuously looped and make us feel like a real live image. Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck in 2011 created the first cinematograph Gif.

03Different Ways to Use Cool Gifs in Marketing

Gifs could be a fun way of using interesting and cool animations in your marketing. There are thousands of Gifs available on websites like Giphy from where you can choose the suitable Gif. You can also create a dedicated brand Gifs for your particular use. Just keep some of the important things in mind while selecting Gifs for your products and brand.

● It must deliver an appropriate message from your brand and product.

● It must be under legal circumference. Do not try to use copyrighted Gifs or celebrity faces Gifs without obtaining due permission.

● It must match your branding style on other platforms.

● Must be visually understandable and appealing.

04How to Use Cool Gifs as Part of Your Marketing

As you already know that apart from being a source of fun during social media conversations, Gifs could also be used in marketing. You can use very cool Gifs to promote your product and boost up your sales. Following are some creative ideas in which you can use Gifs to market your products.

● You can arrange a contest asking the participants to create a Gif based on your product.

● You can create cool Gifs related to your products and circulate them over different social media platforms, information on social media receives very quick attention.

● Cinemagraphs could be a great option when you want to showcase details about your product in an innovative form. This kind of Gifs could be very useful in fashion-related marketing.

● Create your brand Gifs and add cool emojis to them. Emojis in a Gif make it more attractive.

● You can use Gif for the "thank you" purpose. You can send a Gif "thank you" Gif when someone shares something about your product on social media.

● Infographics and Virtual representation are an important part of marketing today. You can use Gif to design creative infographics.

● The logo of your brand is like soul to product. Using Gifs you can design a catchy and attractive logo that helps in boosting the marketing of your product.

Part 2 10 Amazing Examples of Animated Gifs in Email Marketing Templates

Gif has become a cool and easy way of expressing your feelings so now you don’t need to type all those long boring messages. Nowadays, email marketers are using a wide range of Gifs to market their products to customers. These Gifs attract the interest of viewers and lead to an increase in sales. You too can use animated GIFs to display your products and services in action. Here you will see 10 amazing examples of marketing gif templates.

01ShoeMint

ShoeMint, a colored socks company has used very catchy Gif to market their socks. ShoeMint goes by email marketing template – "C’mon, Get Happy!" as their tag line and when you look at the Gif of colorful socks you will have a smile on your face.

02Modcloth

Modcloth markets the dresses which can be combined and paired with different trendy and stylish outfits. Their email marketing template attracts viewers’ attention when they see the same dress paired with different other dresses in an animated form.

03Bed Bath & Beyond 

This brand markets a unique Ziploc Space Bag which can be folded and rolled up. The tag line of the email template is "dorm space savers that easily roll up and out to make room for more" and their animated Gifs very well explains the purpose and advantages of these bags.

04Bonobos

To promote their tearaway trousers, Bonobos uses a Gif in which the man removes his pants by just tearing them away. This email marketing template attracts viewers’ attention exactly in the way the company desires. 

05Jack Spade

If you are a branded garment lover then you might have received email marketing templates from Jack Spade in the form of Gifs. This brand uses Gif at a wide range to promote its products online.

06Mr. Porter

Mr. Porter, a brand which is known for its warm and cozy comfort wears. This email marketing template shows a man sitting in a very comfortable position near the fire. This Gif puts the urge for the same comfort level in the viewer's mind.

07Anthropologie 

Anthropologie makes use of octopus made out of paper and flapping its tentacles around in a joyous and happy manner. This catchy Gif abates the viewer to go for the product marketed by the email.

08West Elm

The modern furniture and home decoration company West Elm showcases various lamps in Gif form in their email newsletter. This Gif creates an urge in the viewer's mind about their need for the home decoration.

09Chanel

The Watch making company Chanel showcases their triple row watches using wonderful animated Gif.

10 Singer 22

This company uses a party-type email marketing template to attract customers who’ve just reached the next level of their rewards program.

Part 3 5 GIF Makers That Lets You Create Unique Custom Animations

Now you might want to know which the best and easiest Gif maker to design unique custom animation is. If you search on Google for an online Gif maker, then your search result will be filled with hundreds of such Gifs makers. But here we have shortlisted the 5 best and easy-to-use Gif makers using which you can create unique custom animation as per your requirements.

01Wondershare Filmora Video Editor

To feature at the top of our list is Filmora. Filmora is one of the best video editing tools to turn videos into GIF images. This app uses fabulous text and animation effects to turn your video and images into catchy Gifs. This tool works very smoothly with various OS like Windows 7/Windows 8.1/Windows 10/Windows 11 ( 64 bit OS).

Wondershare Filmora - Best Video Editor for Mac/Windows

Try It Free Try It Free

5,481,435 people have downloaded it.

Build unique custom animations without breaking a sweat.

Focus on creating epic stories and leave the details to Filmora's auto features.

Start a creative adventure with drag & drop effects and endless possibilities.

Filmora simplifies advanced features to save you time and effort.

Filmora cuts out repetition so you can move on to your next creative breakthrough.

The best thing about this gif template maker is that you don't need any technical expertise to use it. You can create gif from all popular video formats like .wmv, .mp4, .mkv, .evo, .dat, .wav, .mpeg and .avi etc. as per your requirements.

02Imgflip

Next on our list is Imgflip, apart from being an efficient Gif creator the main highlight of this tool is that you can create animated GIFs from your pictures or even a Facebook or YouTube video URL. You can also use webcam video directly and rearrange the image to create Gifs.

03GIFMaker.me 

Another great gif template maker is GIFMaker.me. This tool enables the generation of quick and attractive Gifs in a matter of a few minutes. No matter you use Mac, Windows, or Linux, this tool will effortlessly create GIFs from images and videos.

04Gifs.com

Next on our list of best gif template makers is Gifs.com. The website claims to be "the fastest way to make and edit Gifs and short videos". Gifs.com allows you to access a free and easy-to-use media editor which makes it the fastest GIF creator. 

05Imgur

Last but not least to feature in our list of Imgur. Imgur is both a Gif gallery as well as a creator. This tool offers various functions to edit the GIFs you create with features like crop, rotate, resize, etc.

● Ending Thoughts →