Marketing emails are often put together using a single large image rather than text, especially in the header area. An image gives total creative control, enabling you to use appealing creative designed to get a response and engage your audience. But, what happens when your images are blocked?
Unfortunately, most email programs automatically block images meaning that all your recipient see is something like this:
All impact is lost with this message, and unless the recipient chooses to download your images, you've pretty much wasted your time...
What are your alternatives?
You can of course design your email differently, and opt for a smaller image, or a bunch of smaller images and some text. This is probably the best way to go and will ensure that some of your content is always available to be read.
However, if you want to retain the large image format for your emails, there are some things you can and should do to ensure you still get your message across even if the images are blocked initially.
Alt text
Using alt text shouldn't be anything new to you, however you'd be surprised how many people don't do it. If you're doing this with a large image, then you've got plenty of space to write alt text, and you can even put it in some <h> tags to increase it's size and impact. By making this text appealing to the reader, you've got a much better chance of them downloading the images into your email.
Header text
Most emails have a line or two of text above the image such as:
Click here to read this email online; and/or You are subscribed as <email address>. These are both good things to have in the header for various reasons, but why not go one step further.
You can insert a little more text in the header, perhaps a teaser on the email content for example. Again, this will entice your reader to download the images into the email.
Segment your list based on opens
Your email campaign reports show clearly who is and who isn't opening your emails. You can safely assume that the people who are opening your emails either have your from address on their safe senders list; have image blocking disabled; or simply like your emails.
One option would be to segment your list based on who's been opening your emails, and only send the large image format to those people. You can then send another version of the email (based around a text design) to the other subscribers.
Only specify width dimensions, not height
When you set the image dimensions in an email, those dimensions then represent the size of the "blank" image before it is downloaded. So one idea is to only set the width dimension, and leave the height blank. That will result in some email clients simply showing a blank image for the relative width, but not the full height. This means that your text below the image will move up and be visible for some recipients.
Comments & feedback
If anyone else has some ideas on this, I welcome your comments - what have you done to overcome this issue?
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written by Tony , May 12, 2009
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Example, if i put the width 200px and leave the height empty, the result will be an empty image box 200px by 200px.
Doesn't works...