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.

CASL and existing opt-in addresses
iMessage Spam

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Blackberry Oops
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If you slice your images in an email and the end user hasn’t loaded images what will they see? They’ll see a rectangular box – either empty or with the image alt text in it. And, if you set the background colour for the table cell, they’ll see that – but only when images are turned off.
If you’re sneaky, you can do clever things with that.
Images off:

The same mail with images on:

Or like this, with images off:

And the same mail with images on:

(There’s more discussion in this reddit thread about it).

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