Text to Image ratios in email

One of the questions I get from folks about delivery is what the optimal text to image ratio there should be in an email. I’ll be honest, I hate this question. Why? Because the question is actually irrelevant. I’ve seen companies with a single image and no text get to the inbox. I’ve seen companies with no images get to the inbox. The text to image ratio is not going to make or break delivery.
Sending mail that the user expects and wants is the crucial part of delivery. If the user wants a single image? That’s the right ratio. If the user wants a readable message with images turned off? That’s the right ratio. Fretting about 20/80 or 18.5/81.5 or 43.256666/56.743334 is getting buried in details and missing the bigger picture.

Emails should be readable. These days, being readable on mobile is critical. This is the single best argument I can think of against one-image emails. And there are still folks who read email with images off by default. Being one of them, I think it gives me insight other delivery folks lack. If I am engaged with a brand, how do I show it outside of loading images? What kinds of things let the brand know I’m still a happy recipient?
If anyone tells you that your delivery problems are the result of a bad text to image ratio, run away. There is zero chance that’s actually true. Filters aren’t going to just look at the ratio and block ratios that fall into a certain range.
What filters are going to do is take the text to image ratio as part of the fingerprint of an email stream. They’re going to recognize certain factors about emails that users like, and factors about emails that users don’t like. Some of these factors will be things like the text to image ratio. But the “wrong” ratio isn’t why mail is being filtered. Mail is being filtered because the recipients aren’t interacting with it enough and the ratio is just one part of the way the ISP identifies it.
Stop fretting over your exact text to image ratios. The right, or wrong, ratio isn’t a true factor in delivery. Instead, focus on creating an email stream that users want, expect, and engage with. This starts with address collection, but collecting accurate addresses isn’t enough. You also need to provide value to them.
Sending mail users want is the key to reach the inbox. Doing that takes time and investment by the sender.

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Since that series of blog posts a few things have changed. The biggest thing is that the webmail providers are being much more aggressive about disabling email reception at addresses where folks don’t log in. I have a few addresses on different providers I use for testing purposes. I have to remember, though, that I need to log into them before sending test messages. If I don’t, they generally bounce.
This doesn’t completely remove the challenge of zombie addresses but it does make it easier for regular senders to purge their lists of zombies just through their normal bounce handling. No double-taps needed.

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Yesterday there was a lot of talk about Verizon moving out of email and transitioning all their customers over to the AOL backend.  The source was a page in the Verizon help center about transitioning an email address. There is no date on the page, so it’s unclear when this is going to happen or when it started.
I posted about Verizon beginning this transition back in May of 2016: Changes coming to Verizon email. The wording on the AOL page I link to is very similar to the wording on the page that was passed around yesterday.
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For companies that use an email address as a primary key for logins or accounts, it’s probably a good time to contact customers with a verizon.net address and ask them to update their address. That’s a good idea most of the time, but when we know changes are happening at a domain level, it’s a requirement.

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Gmail image caching update

Late last year Gmail started caching images on their servers, breaking open tracking in some circumstances. This image caching was good for senders, in that images were back on by default. But it was also bad for senders because it broke dynamic content and didn’t allow for tracking of multiple opens by the same recipient.
According to a new blog post by Moveable Ink this issue has now been resolved and Google is respecting cache headers so senders who are using dynamic content or want to track multiple opens can do so.

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