Is an image-rich email so bad?

Common practice is to wag a warning finger at any commercial email made up mostly (or even entirely) of images.

The argument is a clear one. Much email software and many webmail services suppress images by default.

If your email lives by its pictures, then your message dies when those pictures don't display. It's also suggested that image-rich emails attract more attention from spam filters.

Good, now Lisa Harmon shows us some beautiful image-rich emails in this post over at the EEC where she talks about product photography.

I can't be certain, but I'm sure all the highlighted emails look pretty uninspiring if images are blocked. Yet...I'm equally sure that the folk behind these campaigns are perfectly aware of image blocking issues.

So, do they know something we don't know?

Are recipients perhaps instructing their webmail service or email client to download the images? More than we might think?

Yes and no. Your chances of getting people to manually want your images displayed probably depends on a number of factors:

Brand and recognition

The more a recipient trusts and values the sender and the emails, the more likely they are to accept images. Trust itself depends on many factors, but chief among these will be your brand and previous experience with your business and email program.

This is further support for the idea that you need to write/design your sender line, subject line and the top of your email body (which is most likely to show up in preview panes) to ensure people are clear on where the email is coming from and what it's all about.

The nature of the experience

Both the basic nature of an email and the specific way you design and copywrite it impact the decision to download images or not.

For the first, think emails where the reader actually wants or needs to see images as part of the fundamental experience. Consider an email promotion selling modern art. Or an email newsletter with a travel report on the Rio carnival.

For the second, think a business report on sales trends. Written well, it should intice people to download images so they can see that nice chart of sales through time.

Alt tags are critical here. Where they are used (and a recent Bronto survey suggests they're not used as much as they should be,) it's mostly in a descriptive sense:


But alt tags could and should be treated as another part of your copy. So they engender the desire to see the image or take the action called for in the image.


In the light of the above, we note that all Lisa's image-rich examples are big brands -- Macy's, J.Crew, Williams-Sonoma etc. -- involving very visual shopping experiences. (You don't buy clothes or fashion accessories based on a technical description of the materials used to make them.)

So perhaps folk really are activating those blocked images. What do you think?

More on image blocking | Tags: email marketing, image blocking, image suppression

Sign-up for the Email Marketing Reports NEWSLETTER
Twice a month, free, packed with email marketing advice and all the posts from this blog.

Email:      First Name:     
    More info and sample | Your privacy is guaranteed

Email marketing search engine
Introduction to email marketing and email advertising basics
Listings for email marketing services
Sources of email marketing statistics
Advice on email design and delivery issues

Top 21 email marketing info sources
Outlook 2007 and HTML design
Events and webinar roundup

Visit the main website for everything email marketing.