What an animated gif can do to an e-mail?

[x-man]

Adding animation to email was all the rage five to seven years ago, and then it fell out of favor. A group of marketers and Olympus revisited the idea. They tested adding animated gifs into their emails, despite so many email providers blocking images by default. They tested it anyway, inspite of the risk. Surprisingly, conversions are up 49%!

[bullseyeram]

Well what can they do? For many its gonna be time lost! It going to take some time to load these file and before I can see the animation I am already pressing the next message button!
You dont know how many potential clients you are missing up because they cannot wait for your email animation to load...so its revenue loss.

[mini_0]

Well , i think a good animated gif can do wonders to the program as I personally have been clicking on those links in emails that seemed good and inviting . Also the advantage is that gif images are particularly smaller in size than jpgs so they load out faster and there is no way your email reader can miss them , also keep the gif quite professional too , because you never know who might be reading your email at any time .

[WEB-Link]

I believe an animated gif will gain more attention than not. It is a typical human reaction to change their attention to something that changed on their monitor while they didn't request it. And isn't that the purpose of a banner, to get your attention? The problem that you bring up as far as long load times is a burden of the developer to ensure the filesize is not overwhelming. Many banner exchanges require a maximum filesize to ensure they do not reach this burden. This is also offset by technology advances which deliver faster bandwidth. Watch for the full motion video to be delivered in a banner soon....