I know I have rambled on this topic before and if you’re a graphic designer, you've probably already tuned me out. But yes, it’s time for another rant about image-only or mostly image-based emails.
Let's set it straight today, please?
Check out this email in my inbox from Pier 1 - a major retailer.
Pier 1 email in my inbox - images turned off in Outlook by default.
- no headline or offer visible
- almost all image-based
- likely to get caught in spam filters because of ratio of text to images.
Let me tell you what’s wrong here:
First of all, their emails - when showing images - are beautiful. They look like expensive direct mailers or full page spreads. The issue is many email programs these days disable images by default. This means that all that great layout and design work often never gets seen if or when it makes it into the inbox. Can you imagine any other marketing being effective if you had to ask people to do something to look at it? Hopefully, you see my point (no pun intended).
Most people won’t do it unless they really trust you, value you, and look forward to what you have to say. (more on that in another post on the issue of relevancy and the Inbox).
Fortunately, Pier 1's email marketing department knows enough best practices to put a message at the top of the email creative. The message asks recipients if they can not see images to click and view the email with images turned on via a web page. (By the way, this is something that SendLabs will do this for you.)
Many marketers worry that the message chews up space for their great message. Our response is this:
1. What good is all that creative work if images are disabled and no one knows what your email is trying to say?
2. That link at the top of those emails? Guess what? It's one of the most clicked links inside your emails. Scout’s honor! This means many people often skip downloading your beautiful images and click to view it all online! So the question remains…why do retailers do this? Well, some retailers are basically stuck in the print world or have some ad agency designing up these "eblasts". The problem is their delivery rates on their emails are plummeting.
Why?
Because image-based emails are one of the tools spammers use to bypass text filters that pick up those naughty spammer words. They embed them in an image and the filters can't read them. Now, popular spam filters are disabling images or routing image-based (meaning majority images) right to the spam folder.
"Graphics are there to supplement your copy, not replace it."
Email Summit '07
Moral of the story?
Make sure your email system allows you to put a "click to view online" link at the top of your beautiful creative email and ask your designers to stop designing image-based emails. Please note that I am not saying go to strictly text. Images are fine, but just balance it so that if images are disabled, you can still get the message across. In my next post, I plan on showing examples of marketers that get it and those that don't. Stay tuned…