How to fix images not displaying with your email marketing. So, you’ve designed a great looking email design, it really presents your company exactly as you’d want it. It has some great images of your products, your offices and company branding.
But, there’s a problem, when you’ve sent a test to your own inbox, none of the images are displaying. There are a number of reasons why that can be, but thankfully it’s generally a quick and easy fix to do. In this video, we’ll take a look at each possible scenario and explain how to fix it.
Images don’t load by default, the recipient has to click on a link to display them inside the mailer
This is generally caused by the sending domain name not being verified. If you are using third party email marketing software, then your email will appear to your recipients as benign from you - but sent via your software supplier’s network. This can cause some mail filters to withhold displaying images until the viewer has said ‘yes, they are safe to show’
This is where domain verification comes into play. Domain verification involves adding an SPF record and a DKIM signature to your domain name settings. We’ll include a link to our PDF guide in the description.
Adding this verification provides a seal of authenticity, this helps with mailbox filters and typically can be an easy fix for your images not auto-displaying.
Broken links
Any images contained within your mailer need to be hosted on a remote location - this could be on your web server, or via your email marketing software provider’s cloud storage. If some of your images don’t display then it’s recommended that you double-check the image path and file name.
Sometimes, something as simple as a typo can be the issue. The other part to check is that the image URL works if you post it into a web browser (it should then show the image on it’s own in a browser tab). It’s quite easy to accidentally put an image into your design using the local path - and not the full externally accessible URL.
Invalid SSL on your website
In recent years, Google has placed greater importance on your website having a properly set up SSL certificate. This means that your website is accessed by typing the prefix of https - as opposed to the older route of http.
If your website’s SSL certificate is incorrectly set up - or if you don’t have one, then this can affect your email marketing images. If you are hosting images contained within your email marketing on your website, then an incorrect SSL setup can cause these not to display. This is because your recipient's email browser would see these images as a security risk and therefore may block them.
To see if this is an issue affecting your images, you can check by copying and pasting the full url of the image into a web browser such as Chrome and clicking on the ‘padlock’ icon next to the url. This will show the current status of the SSL certificate. If it's broken or missing, you’ll get a warning message via the Chrome pop up.
If you have an issue then it’s worth reinstalling your SSL or talking to your web hosts and asking them to do it.
Summary
Today we’ve outlined the three main reasons why your images might not be appearing in your email. It’s really worth taking the time to thoroughly test your email marketing, Generally, these are pretty straightforward issues to fix.