The big image: alternatives
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on September 18, 2008
Thanks to image blocking, this visual feast often looks like this when viewed in a preview pane (this is a real example):
A minimalistic work of art commenting on the emptiness of an online existence? Certainly not an "engaging email experience."
So what are your alternatives?
The obvious one is to redesign the email so you do away with the big header image. Use smaller images, throw in some HTML text and effects, etc.. And that's probably your best choice.
But what if you want to keep that big image? What if you want to retain that big visual impact? How do you tackle the blocked image problem illustrated above?
Here are some approaches I've seen...
Alt text
Of course, the first thing you need to do is put in some alt text (see yesterday's article). Since there's plenty of space for it, you can be fairly creative in writing something that encourages people to pay closer attention, scroll down, click, activate images, etc.
Use a preheader
The impact of that beautiful image will not be lost on those who see it if it's preceded by a line or two of preheader text. And those who don't see the image have something to read in their preview pane.
Most preheaders are limited to links to web versions of the email and a plea to get added to an address book. Be more inventive and add in some teaser text that encourages people to pay attention, much like the alt text seeks to do.
Get some inspiration from Chad White's RetailEmail blog, which often features examples of innovative (pre)headers.
Send it to the image-friendly list segment
When I highlighted this idea a while back it got a mixed response. But I've seen it recommended elsewhere since.
How about sending the big image header just to those recipients who opened your last X emails. If they recorded, say, three opens recently, then they must have had images enabled (otherwise the tracking image would not have been triggered.)
This solves the image blocking problem by bypassing it.
Don't specify alt, height or width attributes
A bit experimental this one: you'll need to test it.
If you leave out the alt text and don't specify the height or width of the image, then a small icon-size block or square gets displayed by most clients and webmail services when images are blocked.
(Even Outlook, with its security warning text, will still give you a long thin box.)
This has the effect of lifting the text below the image up into view in the preview pane.
So if images are suppressed, the recipient gets to see what's below the image, rather than just the big blocked image. (Assuming you have some sensible copy, headlines or links below the image, too.)
Ignoring those image attributes is counterintuitive to normal best practices, but might make sense in this specialist case.
Thoughts? Other solutions that let you keep the big image?
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3 Comments:
Omitting the img height and width seems the best option.
(But as mentioned in your previous post, it can screw up a design... so many things to consider!)
By 
Tom Buchok, on
19 September, 2008
Thanks Tom. I think the no height/width option is very attractive where you have a simple one-column layout where the shrinking image won't screw up the rest of the design. But if you don't...then like you say...so many things to consider!
By , on
19 September, 2008
This is one area I am struggling, when advising my customers. There is no one size fit all answer. When many small images are placed in the content and you don't specify the image width, the message from email reader stretches everything and even the readable text content is pushed to the right of the screen. Hence I always advise the users to specify the image width. In fact, I read many emails without enabling the images!
By Paddu Govindaraj, on
20 September, 2008
