At EmailManual we don’t normally post about content or html related issues but instead focus on the more technical elements of email, this time we are making an exception.
Approximately half of all consumers have images turned off by default according to a study by the email experience council.
This statistic shows that marketers need to ensure they are using text effectively within their email marketing content in addition to images. Having text with a call to action or targeted offer will encourage the reader to allow images to be displayed within their email which will also register as an email open if you use email open tracking and failing to do this may result in your email being simply deleted or worse, the “this is spam” button being clicked.
One of the easy wins, if you do not want to redesign your content is to use alt tags. These are html snippets within your email which will show a word or sentence when an image can not be displayed. By doing this you give your subscribers who block images by default a chance to decide whether the content is relevant to them and allow the images to display. Without text surrounding your images or alt tags your subscribers will only see empty boxes where your images were supposed to be and this will result in your email not being read and just deleted.
Seems simple enough? We thought so too but surprisingly in a separate study titled ‘Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study’ from the email experience council showed that :-
“Only 42% of the 104 top online retailers included in our study designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% used alt tags adequately or extensively.”
Email Manual recommendations:
* Use a good mix of text and images, don’t include your text within the images.
* Use alt tags for your images where appropriate.
* Trial sending your emails with embedded images rather than linked *
* N.B the figure you should look at here will be your clickthrough or conversation rates and not your open rate, if the images are embedded within the content and the only image that is linked is the open tracking image then users will not see the need to allow the image through and therefore you can reasonably expect a slightly reduced open rate but you may also see a higher clickthrough and conversion rate.
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