Total Self Service Email Marketing 
Are They Getting the Picture(s)?
When you send out a mailing to your recipients, what are they really seeing? The answer may be "not much," to the dismay of those who send out mailings that include images in their HTML.
It's for Your Own Good
If you've ever received spam in your mailbox (and who hasn't?), you've probably received a message with images that you considered objectionable — and that may be putting it mildly!
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) try to protect their customers from spam by putting what they think is spam in junk or bulk folders, or blocking it outright.
But as anyone who receives email knows, these spam filters are not foolproof; some of it invariably reaches your inbox. And if you inadvertently open the message, you might be in for a nasty surprise — a message that has distasteful images.
To address this problem, AOL's Version 9 and Microsoft's Outlook 2003 protect users by blocking images in emails from unknown senders. If the sender's email address is in the recipient's address book, the images display normally. But if not, the images are suppressed, unless the recipient opts to display them, or adds the sender's email address to the address book.
Addressing the Problem
Ideally, your recipients will be so eager to see everything you send that they'll make the necessary entry. They may not know they have to do that when they sign up, so be sure to tell them on the subscription page, and remind them in your confirmation and welcome messages.
It's also a good idea to use the same sending email address (who the message is "from") every time you send email, so you can tell your subscribers what they should be adding to their address books.
Do They See What You See?
But what if some of your readers forget to put your address in their address books? What will your message look like?
Depending on your HTML, your message could literally be a blank page. Maybe you'll get lucky and the recipient will decide to add you to the address book — or maybe they'll decide your message is spam and report it to their ISP.
In this sample mailing to AOL, almost everything is contained in an HTML image. Since the sender's address is not in the recipient's address book, the message appears to be largely blank:
The message is also unreadable in Outlook 2003, though at least there are notices in the message itself that the images have been suppressed.
Outlook 2003 claims that it's protecting recipients' privacy by blocking images, which it does by suppressing "Web beacons" or open tracking. Open tracking is done with a 1x1 invisible gif — an image — so if ALL images are suppressed, you won't even know if the message was opened by the recipient, much less read.
When the sender's address is added to the address book, or if the recipient opts to view the images, the message displays normally. Here's the message with all of its images in AOL 9:
And here's the same message in Outlook 2003 after the sender has been added to the recipient's address book:
The message looks great if the images are displayed — but there's nothing in the message to persuade someone to turn on the images if they've been automatically suppressed.
If images are absolutely required to read your message, your message may be lost. If you remove all images from your email, you lose a big part of HTML email's appeal — the ability to show, not just tell.
Beating the Blank Page
You don't have to eliminate images from your email altogether — just make sure that your message isn't lost if the images are suppressed, by making the offer clear in text, not as part of an image.
This email on AOL 9 includes images that are suppressed, but the message is still readable:
Recipients learn something about the offer, enough perhaps to convince them to turn on the images by using this button:
Of course, the message looks much better when the images are displayed:
Here's the same message with the images suppressed in Outlook 2003. In this case, the HTML includes "alt-tags" for the images. The alt-tags instruct the email client to display text if the images are not available. The warning message Outlook gives for each image is still displayed, but so is the alt-text provided for each image:
Summary
Since you don't know if the images in your email are going to be visible or not, design your mailings to look their best with images — but to be legible if they aren't. Put key information in text, not images, and provide alternative text to be displayed if the images are suppressed.
Remember that your opens rate might be much higher than your statistics show if you have a lot of recipients using AOL 9 or Outlook 2003. The estimated opens statistics in ListManager can give you an idea of what your open rate might really be.
And keep reminding your readers to add you to their address books! If you're a welcome guest, they'll want to see — not just read — what you have to show.
Additional Testing Resources
- Learn about testing your email messages with different email applications
