The suppression of pictures in e-mails is a big challenge for e-mail marketing. Companies fear points of attacks and providers want to save costs. Even the newer version of Outlook doesn’t present it well for e-mail marketers. There pictures are shown only under certain circumstances. Preventing the blocking of pictures completely is most probably impossible.

That’s why it is crucial for marketers to examine and optimize their e-mail strategy appropriately. Here are some tips on what you should take into consideration to get optimum results:

  • Explain it to your customers: They have to understand the common reasons for image rejection and its resulting disadvantage. Educate them further on how their pictures can be displayed. Stress the importance of informing all receivers within the registration process and in following messages about the fact that many common e-mail providers hide the pictures according to standards. Encourage them to go around this mechanism by including the return address of your company to their address directory or to click on the appropriate button in the browser. In order to motivate your customers to want to see your pictures, you should show with the registration some sample illustrations. And something else: As there are for sure some receivers who in general never want to receive images, there should be the offer to choose only text e-mails, too.
  • Introduce relevance methods: Most consumers indicate that they “sometimes” open pictures in permission-based e-mails. This statement indicates that even if the receiver recognizes his relationship with the sender, it has to be pro-actively canvassed attention for each individual message. Therefore, all communication has to demonstrate relevance to “earn” the activation of the pictures. Here, progressive relevance methods like e.g. segmentation can be helpful. And place above your e-mail a reference to the Web version of your mail. Those who click it can see the newsletter on their own browser, but make sure that the hyperlink is written out, so that even those who deactivated all hyperlinks can see it.
  • Optimize content: In order to improve the chances of success for your message, in case your images are rejected, you should provide a balanced proportion of pictures and texts. Use the text to get the advantages of your offer across to the receiver and motivate him, and use the picture to trigger action. Do not make the mistake of solely relying on pictures. Also, do remember to integrate links that allow for the presentation of your message as well as your website. So use the ALT tag: Then instead of the images at least a text will be displayed, which can explain what is intended to be shown with the picture.
  • Use the forward-button to friends and transaction-referred communication: Consumers are quite agreeable to activate pictures in e-mails from friends or family members. For this reason, you should encourage your receivers to forward your message. In addition, e-mail marketers should consider that with transaction e-mails, the pictures are much more often activated than in the case of advertisements.
  • Observe the activities of the providers: Be constantly informed about the image suppression procedures of your provider. It is particularly important to know the subtle distinctions between the various picture suppression methods of e-mail providers as only in this way it is possible for you react adequately. Build into your confirmation e-mail a picture and ask your recipient if they can see it. Those who can’t see it should receive a plain text version of the newsletter instead.
  • Lastly a few tips to ensure that the impact of blocked images are not seriously obvious:
    • Avoid such nice things like background images, which aren’t displayed anyway in newer versions of Outlook or Gmail.
    • Use pictures only to support your statements. Important information however should never solely be shown as a picture but always also as text. This is especially true for price information.
    • Prepare pictures in their original format. Images that have first to be "stretched" in HTML are not always displayed properly. Some programs show stubbornly the original size.
      If your users have problems re-loading the images, you may also switch to the "offline HTML” format, where the pictures are sent immediately along with the e-mail.

By Daniela La Marca