People view their emails through many different programs that treat each email differently – Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail – and there are also many different screen sizes, from desktops to mobiles. Although we are all able to dictate our own personal settings, people generally use the preview panes to view emails and have an email account that requires them to right click to download the images.

Busier inboxes mean marketers can no longer rely on pictures of fancy cars or pretty ladies to get the interactions they want, as all we see is a box with a little red cross and the words “Right click here to download pictures. To protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the internet”. What does this mean from a marketing perspective?

What it doesn’t mean is that we should stop being creative with our emails. It just means we need to test what our audiences like and make sure we include a good ratio of text to imagery. Remember, people expect email to be interactive. We can use it to drive recipients to the web where we have a much more flexible and live environment; your videos can play and people can submit forms and interact. The internet is much more standardized from desktop to desktop so it is easier for you to test your campaigns on different web browsers, such as Explorer, Mozilla or Firefox, and therefore have confidence that most people will get the same interactive experience.

Here are a few tips for optimizing your emails for image blocking:

1. Design for the inbox

Do not just re-purpose an offline piece or webpage and dump it into an email. You need to optimizse what you are sending for the inbox whilst making sure the brand journey remains consistent from email to web.

2. Use text before imagery and include your company name

Even with image blocking on, the recipient can still read an introduction and know who the email is from before having to right click.

3. Host images online

Avoid embedding images in your email as most firewalls will strip these out and people won’t even be able to right click to see them.

4. Use headlines

People scan emails when they receive them so make sure you have meaningful headlines that your recipients can pick out quickly to get an understanding of the content.

5. Do not use images for headings

Make sure that relevant content is in text format. This will ensure recipients quickly know what you are trying to say without having to right click to download designer titles.

6. Front load your sentences

Use keywords and hot topics early in your paragraphs as people will not always read to the end of the line.

7. Repeat your calls to action

People are more likely to click on text than images, so write your actions out and repeat them within your email.

8. Keep the design simple

Do not have too many colors or competing pieces of content, as there will be too much noise. Your recipients will delete your email rather than try to work out which elements are important.

9. Make sure there is brand consistency from email to web

Create landing pages if necessary, but ensure that when a recipient clicks on a link to the web they feel like they are on the same message journey.

10. Consider your subject line and from address

These are the first pieces of information people will see when they get your email. If they are not intriguing, the time you have spent on your creative and content will be wasted as people will delete the email without even opening it.

11. Be a safe sender

Get people to add you as a safe sender as this will mean your images will be downloaded automatically in the future.
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