by Wikus Engelbrecht - GraphicMail Marketing Team
24. giugno 2010 22:12
Have you ever noticed when opening an email that the email client (i.e. Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, etc.) usually displays a link “Display images below”? If not, you’re one of the 33% of all email recipients who have your images displayed by default (as reported in a recent article by Marketing Sherpa) – all other email recipients have their images blocked.
Do you take this into account when you design your newsletters? Have you ever had a look at what your email newsletter looks like when the images have been blocked? Usually the images in your header and at the top of your email say a lot about the content. It contains your logo, and often the title text is included in the image.
Consider the following, should your recipients’ images be blocked:
Will they recognize that the email is from you?
Without the top image, is there some text to pull them into the email?
Will it be clear what the email is about?
When the images are turned off the only text visible at first glance tends to be things like “Trouble viewing this email?”, unsubscribe links, links to the mobile version of the site, anti-spam messages – admin, basically. With nothing to entice your readers, will they bother reading your email?
So how do you get around this?
Bear in mind that when your images are blocked, the content of your email is shifted down. So try and place your headlines above images in the content, that way it will show up even when the content is pushed down. Also remember to make as much use of rich text in your emails as possible. Rich text is displayed even when images are blocked, so (even though including text in images may look impressive) include some rich text in the headlines to make sure your message still comes across.
Another important consideration is that many of your recipients probably have a preview pane activated in their email accounts. The preview pane is a window in their inbox that previews the contents of a selected email – as I’m sure you can imagine, that makes it a key player in piquing the subscriber’s interest enough that they read your email. The key to pulling readers into your preview pane is to check what effect image blocking has on the contents of the pane. Make sure that the text they see when the images are turned off is still a good indication of the content of the email, and that it’s enticing enough to convince them to read further, or at least enable the images.
Keep an eye out – we’ll be launching an email preview feature soon that will enable you to preview what your email will look like when your subscribers open them in various email clients, including what it looks like in the preview pane. It will help you assess how to go about your email design, but in the mean time, I’m sure following the tips above will help you engage more readers with your newsletter.
Once you’re in the habit of testing how your email renders in different email clients, you’ll quickly learn how to work around image blocking. Remember that there is a person on the receiving end of your newsletter – and people are often too busy or simply not interested enough to read your email. By taking this into account when designing your newsletter, you can make a dramatic change in your campaign statistics.
If you missed last week’s interview with our Head of Design, take a look. He gives some excellent professional tips on how to approach your newsletter design.
