Pablo Escobar: Email Kingpin?

Netflix just released their latest show, Narcos, and it’s receiving rave reviews. But before anyone was watching (or should I say, reading) the story of Pablo Escobar, they launched a pretty epic email campaign to get people excited about this new show.

Here is a video of the email:

Their use of animated GIFs in the email to achieve the movie-like effect is very impressive. Even more impressive is they manage to keep the file size down while having pretty impressive resolution and effects.

For those of you interested in getting more into animation in your emails, all it takes is to replace the typical JPG or PNG images you are using with a GIF file. GIFs are able to contain many images in one, which plays through and achieves the animated look that you can see in the Narcos email.

The biggest thing to be aware of is the size of your email. Although connections are faster than ever, people’s attention spans are also shorter than ever, so you’re email needs to load almost instantly to keep people’s attention. A general rule of thumb is to keep your animated GIF under 2 megabytes.

Knak templates fully support the use of animated GIFs anywhere that we have an image placeholder in our templates. Simply update the image URL like you would for any other image in the Marketo editor, and you’re off to the races!

Just don’t tell Pablo we let his secret out of the bag…