In this Loom‑style tutorial, Shaun Whynacht shows how to make your Gmail avatar an animated GIF so it catches the eye when recipients scroll through their inboxes. He walks through the process on his phone: noticing the static profile icons, then creating a square image in Canva, applying one of Canva’s built‑in animation effects (e.g., zoom, drift, fade), exporting the result as a GIF, and uploading it to Gmail via the profile‑picture menu. Shaun explains that the animated avatar appears in the Gmail app and in any email client that pulls the Gmail avatar, including email marketing platforms that use the same address. He suggests the visual novelty can help emails stand out and potentially improve open rates, encouraging viewers to be creative with their avatar animations.
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Hey guys, I want to show you a really cool way to stand out in the inbox with your email. So what you see here is just a Loom recording video I'm going to show you here in a second of my inbox on my phone. So as you can see, when you have Gmail on your phone, you got these little icons here. These are the profile pictures. Now as you look through here, you know, you got like the first name or the first letter in a box. Some people have their avatars on there. Now watch what happens when I hit play on this one. Okay, so do you see the movement that's happening right here on my thumbnail, right? The photo is moving. It stands out, you know, when you're scrolling through, it stands out. So how do you do that? Well, Gmail allows you to upload a GIF, an animated GIF. So how we did that was we just used Canva. You can use a GIF animator or whatever the case, just use a square image. Take your profile photo, we're going to upload it here. Pretty simple. Now you could do things where you flash between your logo and your face. I did just for this demo, I just clicked Animate and I chose one of the ones that were here. I don't know which one I chose, one of them in there. So let's just say Breathe, that's a slow zoom. We've got Drifting, we've got Fading, whatever the case. So I mean, you can, it's up to you how you wanna animate that. So let's just go ahead and do a photo zoom for this case, and then we're going to download it. Instead of an MP4, you're going to download it as a GIF file. Okay, so when you download that, uh, it'll save your computer. Then you go into your Gmail account that you have, and then you go up here to the top right-hand side, and you click on your profile picture, and you click on the little photo icon here, and then you can upload that GIF And then as you see, it will become that animated GIF that's there. And if you're using any kind of email marketing system that you have your email connected to that account, it will pull that in there because it is an avatar on that email address. So it's a great way to stand out. Be creative in what you do, and let's see if you get better open rates by doing that.
