Images, again

It’s a new year, but an old problem. Email with unloaded images.
Sure, you should be including critical content as text, and/or including alt-text as a normal part of your creative design process, but at the bare minimum you should look at what your mail looks like without images.
The last thing you want to do is send out email with just one strong call to action – the unsubscribe link.

Inbox__63056_messages__8_unread_-2

With images loaded it was a really nice year summary mail, with a link to web content they’d clearly spent a lot of effort on. Without images, it’s just a call to unsubscribe.

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Know your target audience…

… and the device they’re probably going to read your email on.
@lauter from MailChimp points and laughs at an advertising email from Blackberry-the-company that’s completely unreadable when read on Blackberry-the-device.
Blackberry Oops
That’s really bad marketing on a bunch of different levels.

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Gmail speaks on image caching

Gmail released a blog post last week discussing their new image caching and why they implemented it. The short version is this is a way to improve the gmail user experience by screening images for malicious activity and serving the images faster from the Google caching machines.

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More info about Gmail image caching

A lot of people are discussing the new Gmail image caching around the web.
This doesn’t yet appear to be rolled out across all of Google’s network, so some people in different parts of the world are reporting different behaviors. This is leading to a little bit of confusion, as folks are reporting things like seeing multiple opens for a single image. These reports are clearly accurate, but may only be an artifact of a slow rollout across the network.
There are a couple bullet points I think are important.

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