But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a beautiful design. Use a bulletproof button to accomplish this and make sure your CTAs always show up: Email with images off: Button has been done with live HTML to ensure it still appears (Source: my inbox) Background imagesĭon’t trap text in your images.
As the main driver for your email, you want to ensure your CTAs show up no matter what experience your subscribers are using. Using live text in calls to action (CTAs) is imperative. And you know my stance… If you're only doing baked-in text for branding reasons, you care more about your font than you do about your subscribers with limitations
I can't imagine this taking more than 1-2 hours 2 code 2 improve accessibility. Magic Spoon does a great job of having their images contain proper ALT text, but it would be very simple to have those as live text in a tag for a much more impactful no-images version such as what Ace Hardware did: Magic Spoon email with images off Brand styles are important, but not more important than thinking about your subscriber’s experience. Keep your text in paragraph and header tags. Have buttons and text be coded using HTML instead of created as a graphic. That means not putting text (especially key information) in an image. The best way to code emails to ensure maximum accessibility is to code emails with live HTML. There are several ways you can code an email to provide a great experience even in clients where the images are blocked. How can you optimize emails for images off? Since you can’t tell exactly how much of your audience is opening emails with images off, it’s best to create your emails with image blocking in mind to ensure the best experience for everyone. Is that indicative of what Outlook users do? It could be, but we have no way of knowing.
No image loading means no open is tracked.Īccording to our prior research from when Gmail first started turning images on by default in 2013, 43% of Gmail users used to view emails with images off. There’s no real way to tell how much of your audience is impacted by image blocking, as the open rates are measured by having an image pixel load. Who blocks their emails from loading images? Preview your emails across over 100 email clients, apps, and devices to ensure an on-brand, error-free subscriber experience-with and without images turned on. Most other email clients, with the exception of AOL, show images by default. These days, the biggest culprits are the Outlook desktop clients. In the past many email clients blocked images by default. This makes it even more important for email marketers to make sure any images being used are optimized.
Subscribers have to really dig to figure out how to turn images off for their mobile devices. The bandwidth argument would still be a good reason for image blocking to be turned on, but all mobile email clients we tested allow images by default. This allows for the email clients to check for viruses and malware before the images reach inboxes, decreasing the need for image blocking as a security feature. They also offer the point that blocking the images by default allows people with lower bandwidths to choose if they want to use that bandwidth for image download or not.įor email clients that have images turned on by default, many of them use image proxy servers to host the images instead of having the images come directly from the external hosts. Microsoft claims they block images to help their readers avoid viewing potentially offensive content as well as protect them from malicious code. There are several reasons why email clients block images or turn them off by default. Or this one with better image ALT text (still doesn’t look great, though, right?): Email created with multiple images: ALT text provided is a bit more descriptive in places Why does it happen? This results in images not showing up in emails, such as this one with almost no image ALT text: Email made up of 2 images: limited non-descriptive ALT text provided
Let’s dive into how the changing landscape has impacted images in email and update some of our best practices for email image blocking in 2021 and beyond.Įmail image blocking is the practice where images are blocked from emails or not displayed by email clients or company servers. But as email has advanced, the landscape has changed.
Lots of reasons have been given for this. If you’re in email marketing, you’ve probably heard that you’re not supposed to send all-image emails. Enterprise Plan Boost collaboration and drive results.
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