Earlier this year, image only e-mailers with text embedded in the image, were once again popping into my inbox at a rate of knots from companies I’d not signed up to. And I was definitely not in their target market. (Lollipop parties were something I would have done for my kids some years ago, but not now!)
My automatic reaction was to: delete them, mark them as junk, block the sender, unsubscribe or all four. Setting aside the fact that they are blatant spam, they push the limits of trust and credibility and ultimately harm the companies who have paid to do it.
I naively thought this style of image only email marketing was exclusive to Panama, until I chatted with peers and Email Service Providers at a recent Email Marketing Conference and discovered that it is much more widespread than I had originally thought.
If you are a large company sending millions of emails each month and use professional services such as Return Path to ensure deliverability, then its acceptable, but for small to medium sized businesses it can be a major headache. Multi-part emailers are the way to go.
Here are the 7 deadly sins and 7 blessed virtues that explain why sending image only e-mailers can be bad for your business:
Deadly Sin No 1: Images do not render
Ever seen emails in your inbox with a big blank space and a question mark or a red cross and no text? These are images that are not rendering in your inbox because:
1. Most mobile devices (except for Iphone) have the default set to switch images off in order to reduce data usage and preserve battery life of the device.
2. On a PC or Lap top, the email client (Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook) may not be set to download images automatically.
This means that the beautiful image you’ve spent time and money crafting will be invisible and the email risks getting deleted without ever being seen or read.
Virtue: Best practice is to use a multi-part emailer with a good blend of text and images (50/50 is ideal).
Ensure that your “alt” text is properly set so that even if the images don't appear, the text does. (Note that: on emails that are forwarded, the “alt” text may not render).
Enter a message in the pre-header which is above the main area of image and text. We use two messages: the first on the left is a promotional message and the other a link to open the e-mail in the browser.
Try and persuade your customers to “whitelist” your company by adding you to their contact list.
Deadly Sin No 2: Prejudice Deliverability of your Campaigns
Deliverability of your e-mail campaigns is crucial to your business success, so you want to be sure that anything you are sending out will get through the Internet Service Providers and land directly in your customers' inbox.
With ever increasing security by the Internet Service Providers, image only emails have less chance of getting delivered because spammers use this tactic to email spam with links to bad places.
Virtue: Use professional html templates that have been properly and cleanly coded.
You can have your own beautifully branded template designed for your specific marketing needs (ie: Events template; Blog style template; Newsletter template) or you can choose from standard templates available in most Email Service Providers.
Deadly Sin No 3: Links on Images Automatically Disabled
About 2 years ago, the big Email Clients such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail suddenly decided to disable links on images in e-mailers.
This was another attempt to put a stop to the evil spammers using links on images to send people to bad places.
Imagine then that an e-mailer with one image linked to your website can never be clicked because the link has already been disabled before it reaches the inbox of your customer.
Virtue: Include a text version of your link in your e-mailer.
Deadly Sin No 4: No call to Action Button
Image only e-mailers usually have no proper call to action, or, if they do, its buried in the main messaging of the design or stuck at the bottom of the emailer in a tiny font size.
The whole point of an emailer is to get people to click to your website where they can take an action. So you need to carefully consider:
1. Where you place that call to action.
2. The size of the call to action button.
3. How you get people to click on the call to action – ie: the text and design you use.
Virtue: Always make sure you have a call to action button in all your emailers and test to determine where the best place for that button should be.
Deadly Sin No 5: Emailer Not Designed for Email
Email marketing is a very specialist area and most marketers don’t tend to find it as sexy as a full blown TV or Billboard campaign. But it’s important to realize that the design and content of an email campaign is just as important from a creative standpoint, especially if you want to get results across all your marketing efforts.
I’ve noticed that the design for many image only e-mailers is usually downright dreadful or the content has been unceremoniously duplicated from existing marketing collateral such as a leaflet or a press ad without a thought as how it will render in the inbox.
Since around 50% of people open email first on mobile devices, a copy intensive emailer will be totally unreadable on a mobile phone. The sheer quantity of content may also be overkill and the layout of the elements may render very badly, not allowing for inclusion of the all important call to action.
Virtue: Design specifically for email with a clear proposition, less text, less overall content with a very clear call to action. Test to see how it renders in the inbox on multiple devices.
Deadly Sin No 6: Images, Images, Images
The number of images you include in an emailer, especially without some plain text (multi-part emailer), can play havoc in the inbox.
Images take a long time to download and use up a ton of data. The more images you include in your e-mailer, the longer it takes to download the entire email. People are short of time, impatient and simply won’t wait!
Virtue: Try to keep the maximum number of images to two or three and the resolution as low as possible without losing the quality.
Deadly Sin No 7: Don’t Deceive your Customers
If you’ve been running your email marketing campaigns using beautifully designed, branded templates and then suddenly change to sending out an image only email campaign, you risk destroying the trust factor with your customers.
Over time, customers can become very comfortable with your email campaigns and like the fact that they are familiar and regular. (Many even claim to look forward to receiving them).
If you suddenly change to image only emailers that don't communicate the quality or style they have been accustomed to, they are thrown off balance. Even though you may be bored with it because you’ve seen it 3 million times, your customers may absolutely love it! (That's not to say you shouldn't refresh your design or layout).
Virtue: Try and achieve some sort of consistency in your email marketing in terms of:
- Design and layout
- Server and IP you send from
- Name that you send from (ie: Your Company Name)
- Subject lines
- Message style and tone
- Timing
This will contribute to your “trust” factor with your customers and ultimately help you achieve better deliverability, open and click through rates and most importantly, sales.
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