With office and household internet speeds increasing file size is no longer such a concern with your email marketing. Marketers can quite comfortably attach quite large bulky images and they will download fairly quickly.

As we have mentioned before in this blog, the heavy use of images still have is disadvantages. By default, not all email clients will display the images attached to an email. If you email campaign is very image heavy, users with images blocked will fail to get your message.

When designing your next email campaign, with the use of images you can quickly design a stunning looking layout  – however be cautions with the overuse of images.

Using images in emails: our advice

1. Alt tags

Many people tend to overlook adding Alt tags to images. When a email client blocks an image by default, the Alt tag becomes very important. An Alt tag provides the user with a quick summary of the image before it is loaded.

In addition to this, use your Alt tags wisely, dont simply call an image ATL “company logo”. In your Alt tags you should provide an informative statement which will prompt the viewer to display your images – such as “new samsung Hard Drive”.

2. Height and Width

When adding images inside your campaign always set the height and width attribute. Since some email clients will block your images by default, if you specify the image size this will mean that the structure of your layout will be maintained even without images displaying.

3. Reuse old images

If you have sent several email campaigns before, where possible always re-use your old images.

If you have sent a recipient an email before and they opened it, chances are that the image file may still live in their temporary internet files on their computer. So even if the user is blocking your images, if the image has been previously viewed – chances are it may display!