Images

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gmail deploys image proxy servers

This afternoon Justin Foster of LiveClicker posted to the OnlyInfluencers list asking about Gmail rewriting links.

Creative HTML Table Abuse

There’s an old-school ’90s HTML design trick that dates back to the dim and distant past before we had decent layout control in CSS. That’s “slicing” – chopping a large image up into multiple parts, then reassembling them in an HTML table.
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).