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.