Images make your email look more attractive, help convey your brand and show what products are on offer. The problem is that most email clients are now setting their default image setting to “images off”.

This means if your email is image heavy, or above the fold all you have is a corporate logo you’re going to run into some problems.

Namely:

• By not being branded above the fold people can’t easily see who the email is from and will delete without reading.
• All your key offers are in images that are not being displayed so no-one can see your great half price deal – click through plummet!
• If you haven’t added alt tags people will just see a blank message – unsubscribes soar.
• Spam filters will zap you as you’re too image heavy, they look for a good balance of copy and imagery.

So that’s the doom and gloom, let’s fix it!

• Start by displaying any copy/USP/offer that’s in an image also as copy in the body of your email.
• Display your company name above the fold in HTML text, something like Company X’s Monthly E-news and then put your corporate logo next to it.
• Always add alt tags to your images. It means people can see what the images are before they download them; they will grow to trust you and ultimately it gives the user the choice to decide if pink_wellies.gif is relevant to them.

Gap

Here is an example of an email that is too image heavy (displayed with images off).

You wouldn’t write an email in all caps, so why would you put the alt text in all caps?

Spam filters will pick this up and give it a negative rating.

It’s also got a high image to text ratio which again will trip some spam filters.

The header/menu bar could be text and HTML tables.

Eddie Bauer

Here's an example of a good use of imagery (displayed with images off).

This email works because of it’s mixed use of HTML text-only design and images.

The background table colours and CSS on alt text all work with their overall design.

For clients who think that their business is so dependent on images that they can’t imagine someone viewing an email with images off- Eddie Bauer does it quite well. They manage to hint at the style of their clothes in the palette, and use alt text sparingly and effectively.

Notice their menu headers are not images, but gray text on white background table.