Images in Emails Blocked? Here is What You Can Do About It

Email Marketing 101

Today we are going to start a new series called Email Marketing 101. I will try and keep the content within these posts pretty straight forward and relevant for the average bear. If you have any questions drop me a line in the comments. Enjoy!

We’ve all seen it. You open your email client and find new emails. To protect you your email client blocks the images unless the email is coming from “Safe Sender” or another known party you have approved.

Your email client does this primarily to protect you from spammers using tracking pixels also known as a “Web Bug” . But these spam protections have a huge impact on your email campaigns. Essentially they force your emails become functional without images.

That said we have compiled a quick guide on how to making your emails appealing without images, or at least until the user enables the images or adds as a “Safe Sender.”

Avoid Image Based Layouts:

Chances are if you have sent a real estate “eblast” in the past few years, it was an image based design. As one of the fasted and most popular ways to design emails, it is no wonder it is so widely used. Essentially this style design is made of one image, or several images, with little or no actual text within the actual email (which can cause your email to be considered spam).

Often this style of layout is chosen because images display rather uniformly across all email clients. This is great benefit, however when an entire email is designed in images, your email is rendered rather useless when images are turned off. Instead of using an image based layout we recommend using tables.

Use Table Based Layouts:

If you are serious about building an effective email campaign we recommend developing your emails within a table based layout. The key difference of table based layouts is their ability to display content (text and links) regardless of whether the images of your email are blocked. This huge advantage allows your email to stand out among other image based layouts. However this is not the only benefit to table based layouts, not only do they display content better but they load faster and are less susceptible of being considered spam.

However for every benefit table based layouts have they have one apparent flaw, they do not render consistently among all browsers. Basically what this means is more testing and time is involved. This is something the email marketing community is working to change via the Email Standards Project.

We’re not going to lie these templates require more work, but we are sure you will see a difference your response rates if you convert from image based emails to table based. In our testing, open rates, click through rates and forwards all increased drastically, not to mention a decrease in spam reports. Who knows some day we may even release a few real estate template or two.

Other Options:

You ask “What to do if you don’t have time to develop an effective table-based layout?”

Well you have a couple of options:

Use Alt tags: Will display the text within the alt tag if the images are turned off. These can be used very effectively in table based emails. The tags are the ones you see at the end of the image tags
< img src ="http://www.yourlocation.com" alt="AltText" />

Ask to be added to your Client’s Safe Sender List: This one is often a no-brainer. If your images are being blocked get added to their safe sender list. However sometimes this can be harder than it sounds. We will talk more about how to approach getting on a safe sender’s list at a later date.

Tags: Email Marketing