Saturday, December 10, 2011

Images in Your Email: Pros and Cons

3:00 AM | Posted by Matt Amigo | | Edit Post

There are many issues to consider when putting graphics in your emails -- here's a brief outline.
If you have ever had occasion to subscribe to an email newsletter, you may have been offered the chance to choose between text and HTML as the format for delivery. For email marketers, the shoe is on the other foot, but the choice is essentially the same: pretty pictures or plain old text. HTML can do many things, but its most obvious asset is that it allows you to use images in your marketing materials.
Should images be part of your message or are good looks overrated?

Pros
  1. Images make messages more interesting and attractive. HTML adds many layout options, including columns, that text lacks.
  2. Links that are presented as images are more compelling, leading to higher click-through rates. HTML generates a rate of 11.6 percent, more than double the rate for text.
  3. Images allow senders to easily track delivery and response rates. Text messages can be tracked, but at the cost of including long tracking links.
  4. Including images creates branding opportunities that are completely absent from text messages.
Cons
  1. Images are less secure. This is a disadvantage that reverberates through almost all of the reasons to stay away from images.
  2. Because of the security risk, images are more likely to trigger spam filters, leading to lower delivery rates.
  3. Because of the security risk, some email services, including big ones like Gmail, strip HTML from messages before delivery.
  4. Users are aware of the security risk and turn images off in their email clients. This is a trend that is only getting worse. According to Marketing Sherpa surveys, the proportion of users who allow images as the default configuration was 55 percent in 2006, 41 percent in 2007 and only 33 percent in 2010.
  5. If recipients have images turned off, the Email Experience Council reported in 2007 that 21 percent of messages with images appeared completely blank in the user’s inbox.
  6. Beware the preview pane. MarketingSherpa reports that more than 80 percent of business recipients and more than 50 percent of online consumers use the preview pane to view their messages. Images in the preview pane have a different and less predictable look than images displayed in a full message.
  7. Image-filled HTML messages take more time to format and need more testing in different browsers and clients to ensure proper display.
With such a simple list, it may look like a resounding win for text, but the choice is much more complicated in light of the clear click-through advantage that images provide. Marketers always have the option to test their messages, sending a text version and an HTML version, so that they have some real-world feedback to rely on.
If your greatest concern is that users are in the habit of blocking images, there is a simple answer. Users block images because they have learned to distrust them. As is inevitably the case, give your readers a reason to trust and value what you send and they will respond, even if you fill their inboxes with a museum’s worth of images.

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