Creative Components of Successful Email Campaigns: Email Images
Images: While an email marketing best practice is to offer subscribers a choice between receiving plain text or HTML messages, the use of graphics in the HTML version will greatly increase the emotional aspect of your emails as long as you choose your images wisely.
Like all great works of art, the right image grabs hold of you and expresses feelings and emotions. The graphics you choose for your emails must convey to your readers that their lives will be happier, more exciting, and better if they take advantage of your offer. Before you send out your emails, scrutinize each graphic and ask yourself what the image says to you and how it makes you feel and only send images that express the right emotions.
There are several technical issues that you have to be aware of when using graphics. This is the science of images. According to a study by the Email Experience Council, 21 percent of emails reviewed appeared completely blank and an additional 28 percent showed content but were missing the graphics. Even if your recipients have set their inboxes to download your images there could still be issues as you could be using a unique identifier in the address of each email sent, which will prevent your images from getting through. To ensure your emails are rendering properly you must test the emails in different email clients prior to sending the message to your list. It is the only way to know for sure what your images will look like to your audience.
Deliverability: While your deliverability is not a creative aspect that your subscribers can see in the email message, if you do not have the correct items in place it will prevent your subscribers from seeing your messages at all! Delivery is still the number one area of concern for email marketers, and with so many factors that can affect it, it is something that you must closely monitor to ensure your email reaches your subscribers’ inboxes with all of the design aspects and linking features in place. Eight out of 10 marketers struggle with deliverability issues but few know what to do to monitor and solve the problem.
Listrak has published a white paper on this topic entitled “How Reputation Impacts Deliverability.” It includes all of the technical and scientific facts that you need to ensure your reputation with the major ISPs remains strong and that your messages are getting through to your audience.