How to help ensure your email's images won't be blocked

By Mark Brownlow

In a previous post I wondered why some big brands still send out emails made up almost entirely of images. The theory is that many webmail services and email clients block images by default, so an image-rich email would display badly.

After much musing, I suggested that if you had...
■ brand pulling-power
■ a visual buying experience, and
■ clever use of text and alt-tags
...you probably encouraged people to actively download images in large numbers, overriding any default blocking options. Making the image-rich approach a viable option for senders like big fashion brands.

Or maybe it's much, much simpler than that?

Consider the lowly and much-maligned open rate.

One thing it tells us is that anyone who "opened" an email...
■ is not using a service or software which blocks images, or
■ turned off image suppression for emails with our sender address, or
■ is at least willing to download images when our emails turn up
...otherwise the open would not be recorded (see here for an explanation.)

So here's the theory...

Do you need to design your email for image blocking when sending to someone who has opened your emails in the past? No, because they've already demonstrated that they have images enabled.

Anybody wanting to try image-rich emails safely could simply pull out a list of "people who previously opened at least one email from us" and send this group the image-rich mail.

New subscribers and those with no open yet recorded get a "safe" design with a nice balance of text and images, etc.

I can't see a flaw in the logic, but it seems so painfully obvious that I'm sure there must be.

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