Shooting blanks

Today’s inbox delivered – Hallensteins and House of Travel

Mens clothing store Hallensteins today used a big image to get their point across about an important day for them – Father’s Day.  Shame we had images set to off.  This is what I saw.  More, and tips on how to avoid this follow below:


Avoid this mistake by:

  1. Balance images and text.  This will help your email to get delivered, and to look good when it arrives.
  2. Use preheader and header text to describe what’s in the email and why I should open it.
  3. Use alt text so your images at least have a name.
  4. See our previous post about images off.

Then, just as this post was going live, in came House of Travel’s new Mix’n'Match campaign with even the UNSUBSCRIBE link an image, and no identifiable contact details – at worst very poor practice and probably illegal. Every single thing is one image, even the top pre-header text.

This is how it looked with images on:

Compare this one from Metservice (sign up – it’s great – at http://metservice.com/mountain/snow-email ), with images turned off it’s a pleasure to read, and all of the forecasts that follow are readable, useful, and sharable.

Questions? Comments?  Ask our design experts by commenting below.

Posted by roanne parker | August 31, 2010
Bad Email - what not to do, and how to do it,Creative Email Design,Email Best Practice and Deliverability,Email Newsletters,Hall of Shame/Fame          , , , , , , ,          Comments (1)
  • Emma

    This is compelling Ro – what are designers afraid of? Using web fonts? Using less or smarter-placed images? Or do they just not know how to create email friendly material?

    It’s scary that seemingly no one (client or designer) is looking at the campaign from the recipient’s perspective and asking a few more questions.