Admittedly, my design skillz are not where they should be. But then again I'm a sales guy really, always had a "team" of nerds to handle tech and design issues for me, I've always been on the front lines. So when I posted up an article about using effective CTAs (Call To Action) I decided it was time to open up CS3 and start playing with some animated gif's. Yaaaa....that fuckin blows. I'm sure it's easy if you know what you're doing but I don't and I don't have the patients to learn it today. So, I used my 'go to' tool, Google, and came up with this and let me tell you, THIS is easy! All you need to do is create a few basic images and upload them to this thing and press a button...poof! You are now the proud owner of an animated gif. No water marks and they work. You can even set the delay times between frames. So go crazy kids! http://www.gifninja.com/animated-gifs/create :thrasher:
Awesome find Push. However, I always suggest advertiser and pubs not to go too crazy with CTA designs since many email user don't enable images. These anmated or graphical CTA buttons work great on permission based email marketing since most people will enable those images. Therefore, before you spend time creating cool CTA button be mindful of who your recipents are and how they react. Bellow is a screen shot of one of my drops from today, As usual the advertiser had a terrible creative, 2images and ZERO text, so I had to tweek-it and I inserted my own CTA, Look at who got more clicks :smokin: [/IMG]
Who said anything about "going crazy" with buttons? And if no one enables images then why send MIME at all? By your logic you should be sending straight text. The answer to why your clicks were coming from your CTA...because no one wanted to scroll down that image to get to the other one. Not really a conclusive argument when talking about CTA's regardless if they're animated or not. You put shit up top, you're going to see it clicked more, unsub links, CTA's, whatever.
Don't make an assumption about my logic, I never said anything about sending only text creatives. I was simply referring to having a CLEAR CTA i.e img/text ratio. And I never said anything about no one EVER enabling images, however most TLD automatically disable images unless the user enables them. Therefor, if you have a CTA that's just an image chances are, it wont get as many clicks. All this to say, keep your creatives even- img/text, therefore bedazzle all your buttons if you'd like, just make sure your CTA is in text.
Where does it say anything about image/text ratio? If this is your experience then why do you send images if you KNOW this? I presumed you to have logic, which was clearly wrong of me, and if you know that images aren't going to be displayed it would be 'logical' that text would work better. But that's not the case is it? I posted this because I think it's important to TEST this kind of stuff. Whether you put it in text, big flashing buttons or whatever your choice of "bedazzled" bullshit is, it ALL needs to be tested. Put a animated CTA on top of your next creative, tell us how it worked. I know I'm dropping with several variations of animated CTAs and where I place them because I'm going to find out for myself rather than assume anything. And I thought that the tool to make animated gifs was cool.
I guess you missed the part where I said it was a good find, so thanks! and Yes, test, test, test different variations and I'll leave it at that.
