In the latest MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Report (2010), a survey of email recipients found that only 33% have images turned on by default. That means that 67% – or two-thirds of recipients – don’t.

This is a Jericho client – Mitsubishi NZ – showing how to do email right.  With a mix of images and text balanced so that it allows the email to make sense even if your recipient is in an environment that supresses images by default.  In a corporate environment that’s quite common, as we talked about in this earlier post.

The email on the left here is as it was intended to be viewed and on the right we show it with images ‘off’.

The headline, all links and calls to action, as well as key instructions are clearly visible.

Compare this beautiful campaign to the ‘blanks’ we showed there!  (By the way House of Travel keep on doing the same thing each time they send an email…)

One thing that is on its way to counter that is that the tablets will change the way people interact with your email.

We wrote recently about whether your email is ‘touchable’.   By that we mean that readers on iPhones and iPad for now, and other tablets to come, will be searching for links they can poke their finger at - so your calls-to-action need to be bigger and intuitively they will click on images expecting them to link to content.

Email marketing and iPads and other tablet devices is going to become more ubiquitous and then it will let us have a lot of fun with email campaigns.

Hooray! We can hardly wait for everyone to have iPads – I love mine so much that I’m happy to recommend you request one for Christmas over any other option for a gift.

Then we can keep up our work with clients to make more beautiful emails than ever…

To read our weekly blog posts for the most comprehensive posts on emarketing, and email marketing in New Zealand, click the JERICHO logo at the top of the post here, and pick through the menu on the right hand side, or use the Search box.

Need a robust, experienced, trusted email marketing team on your side to help you get email design and delivery right, no matter where you are in the world?

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.