One of the biggest nightmares for email marketing folk is email client image blocking. It’s a security feature designed to stop email senders from tempting their recipients’ computers into downloading unknown content. Could someone wrap a virus into JPG, embedded in an HTML email? Sure. It also helps stop kinky viagra spam emails being viewed by little Timmy.
Ignoring the expensive options to guarantee image blocking is switched off (Goodmail etc) we can only really do two things. Firstly, we can encourage recipients to disable image blocking on one of our emails early in the relationship. Once image blocking is disabled for the sender, that setting will normally be saved permanently. The other option is to take full advantage of Alt tags. These are the short blurbs of text or ‘Micro-copy’ shown instead of images when the images are unavailable or blocked.
Annoyingly, not all email clients/web clients actually support showing Alt tags (grumble). Here is a list of most current email clients and whether they support displaying Alt tags…
| Supports Alt Tag Display | Doesn’t support Alt Tag Display |
|---|---|
| Hotmail Desktop Client | Entourage 2004 |
| Outlook 2003 | Entourage 2008 |
| Outlook Express | Mac Mail |
| Thunderbird 2 | Outlook 2007 |
| Thunderbird 3 | Outlook 2010 |
| AOL Online | Windows Mail |
| Gmail Online | Hotmail Online |
| Yahoo Classic Online | |
| Yahoo New Online | |
| iPhone Client |
The important things to point out are that Outlook 2007 and 2010 do not show Alt tags and neither do any of the Mac clients. On the bright side though all the webmail clients do show them. As a random observation, isn’t it a little strange that whilst the Microsoft Hotmail Client displays Alt tags, Hotmail online does not?!
So here are my suggestions for getting your recipients to permanently disable image blocking…
- For one of your first communication triggered emails, try sending something with a tempting subject line and a body made almost wholly of 1 image. Include text above the image politely reminding the user to disable image blocking. Simple but some recipients will disable image blocking.
- Instead of using dull, informative Alt tags like ‘logo’ and ‘menu image’ try using ‘Disable Image Blocking’ for every alt tag seen in a typical email client viewing pane. This is clearly a powerful call to action and I’ll be running a randomised test of precisely this very soon. I will post the results.
- Remember to think long term and ensure you write your Alt tags to get your recipients to do what you want them to do. If you write ’50% off’ you’re clearly more likely to get a click than a disabled image block. Do you think ‘unbeatable offer image’ or ‘disable image blocking’ would perform better? Which will provide better long term click through for future email campaigns?
- As ever – experiment, measure and experiment again.
