Consumer Email Behavior: Using Images in Email Marketing By David Daniels: This is the first in an ongoing series where I will be sharing insights from a consumer survey from my firm. As the title suggests, I will be focusing specifically on the email behaviors of consumers. This survey was completed in May 2012 and features results from nearly 400 respondents. Since most email clients turn images off by default, I'm often asked about the use of images in email messages. Because we live in such a visual world, where images and videos are seemingly everywhere, consumers are expecting to see images in your email creative. Moreover, with the popularity of reading email on mobile devices that are fully equipped to render HYML, the audience who requires text-only emails is shrinking. It's important to have a properly formatted email creative with a compelling template, as this will assist in driving audience engagement and potentially advocacy. Given that images are turned off, my firm set out to measure how many consumers actually turn them back on. We found that: Fifty-five percent of consumers stated that they turn on the images in the emails that they receive, which rivals the 57 percent of consumers that state they check their primary personal email account on their mobile devices. Far fewer consumers add sender addresses to their address book, which in most email clients will enable image rendering by default. Sixteen percent of consumers stated that they added an email marketer's email address to their address book. Follow these best practices to ensure that your subscribers can see and enjoy all of your images. Size and weight. Talk with your email service provider (ESP) to understand the limits of image size and weight, as some ESPs will compress images that are too big, which will ultimately degrade the quality of the image. Use image alt tags. For those who don't turn images on, ensure that your images have a descriptive text alt tag that acts like a call to action. For example, if there is an image of a red sweater that has a star burst offering 15 percent off sweaters, an ideal alt tag to the image would be "15% off sweaters" not "red sweater image." Use alt tags that evoke the purpose of the image. If you can't figure out what that should be for an image, then perhaps you shouldn't be using it. Link to hosted version of the email creative. This is standard in most email marketing applications, but be sure to include a link at the top of your email template that simply says, "View email in your browser." I often see emails that say, "Problem viewing images? Then Click Here to view in your browser." This is too verbose and also in some email clients such as Gmail, the first words in the email creative get previewed and appended to the subject line. In this example your subject line would read, "Buy Our Best Products Now for 20% Off…Problem Viewing." Simply offer a link to view the email in a browser. Avoid using entirely image-based email. As mentioned, ensure call-to-action images have alt tags and are additionally supported by text. Don't put important disclaimers and required CAN-SPAM language in images. Rely on HTML tables and embedded tables with different colors to highlight any important calls to action, such as "Buy Now buttons." Test, test, test. See which images are working and which aren't. Most ESPs offer a click-overlay heat map that visually shows you where users are clicking most. Test different images with dynamic content approaches. Vendors such as Movable Ink provide an easy-to-use technology that is ESP-agnostic to insert dynamic images that can change and expire content after the email has been sent. It has been said that "A picture is worth a thousand words," so ensure that you're using those image-based words effectively and doing all that you can to make them render correctly. Source: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2195041/consumer-email-behavior-using-images-in-email-marketing
I usually try to avoid using image ads because images are turned off by default. But I always use images for advertiser disclaimers, and opt out information, because it keeps the verbiage away from filters. .
This is nonsense -- passive and active open rates are exclusively relative to the list and not the content you're mailing. If you want to measure if your list responds better to graphical creatives, with images, etc, just embed the image on your email and the email clients wont block them. If you are really getting a better response from ads with pictures, then you can start thinking what to do next. This technique cannot be used on a daily basis for obvious reasons (bandwidth, sending speed, etc), however it will certainly give you a better footprint of what your list is more proactive to and it's encouraged to run these kind of tests at least once a month.
Base 64/embedding is definitely worth discussing, but keep in mind you really can't deliver quickly/timely with this method, and you really use a ton of bandwidth.. best to use this only on really top-producing offers and to small chunks of clickers IMO.
Yeah, using small sized images with Base 64 can really liven up an ad. You can do sooo much more with images than html text. Even simple things like having an image using "no no" words and phrases, like CONGRATULATIONS, or FREE... in big, bright red letters, etc. .
Then this discussion would eventually end up at how base64 adds points to your overall spam score. While great at surreptitiously avoiding some filters, it can hinder you as well. So - where do you call it a win vs. a loss?
I wasn't referring to the price of bandwidth, more the fact delivery will take significantly longer due to the giant attachments. I get some stuff by people mailing base that's 100K or larger per email... mostly because they have no clue how to reduce image quality so it still looks presentable but is only 25% of the file size. But even if you reduce an ad to 25K per message, it's more of a challenge to send out your drop in a timely fashion. @push, what SA rule responds to embedded images and what is the default point penalty?
For whatever reason this fuckin' forum software wants to smash all this together so you'll have to look close....or just follow the link and you can do a quick base64 search: AREA TESTED LOCALE DESCRIPTION OF TEST TEST NAME DEFAULT SCORES (local, net, with bayes, with bayes+net) rawbody Extra blank lines in base64 encoding MIME_BASE64_BLANKS 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 rawbody Message text disguised using base64 encoding MIME_BASE64_TEXT 0.001 0.001 0.001 1.741 body eval:check_base64_length('78','79') BASE64_LENGTH_78_79 2.370 2.636 0.762 2.667 body eval:check_base64_length('79') BASE64_LENGTH_79_INF 1.379 2.019 0.583 1.502 SA v3.3.X
Just found this one while looking up another rule: SpamAssassin Rule: FROM EXCESS BASE64 Standard description: From: base64 encoded unnecessarily Explanation The From: line has been encoded, but can already be expressed in US-ASCII. This is likely an obfuscation technique.
