The Pitfalls of Image-Heavy Emails
Just because an image can do wonders in your email doesn’t mean that it’s always the right approach. It’s like any tool — used incorrectly can hurt the effectiveness of your email. We’ve long argued for the importance of live-text in images (get ready for a rant below), because a lot can go wrong when an email is 100% image. Here are a few common scenarios where image-reliant emails fall short:
Your image file-size is too big.
In places where internet connections are fast, we generally don’t consider the impact that file size can have on download time for people off WiFi. But so many of us are reading emails on the go, and huge files can take eons to load when we’re relying on cell networks rather than WiFi.
Your image dimension size is too small.
An image can look great on a desktop when it’s big and beautiful and sprawling, but the details become indistinguishable on a much smaller phone (looking at you iPhone SE).
Your image focus is too broad.
National Geographic photographer, Jim Richardson, explains that taking a photo of a waterfall is easy, but zooming in on the pine tree at the base of the falls is a much more captivating scene. There’s just one thing to take in, not the entire vista. Find the story and make simplicity key.
Your image count is too high.
This happens when your team can’t decide on the image or what to cut out, so they just keep filling it up with what they have been told to include. We’ve seen too many emails image-stuff, which also increases the load time as each image request is triggered upon opening.
Why All-Image Emails Are The Worst
The WORST. Seriously. All-image emails and text-in image emails are on our hit list, even if we get why/how they happen.
We’ve probably all done it at some point in our email careers. You take the photoshop image that your designer gave you, slice it up in a few chunks, and then add links to those images and call it good.
Here are all the reasons why doing that is the wrong way to do email (in alphabetical order because they’re all bad):
Accessibility: all-image emails rarely have descriptive alt-text enough for visually impaired individuals to grasp what the email is about.
Clarity of text in images: JPGs aren’t good at rendering text. It doesn’t handle sharp changes in contrast. That’s simply how the format was designed. Likely better usage would be a PNG-8, but even then, you’re looking at a lossless format. Also, when an image scales for different devices, it can become pixelated or be unreadable if it has small text.
Data: consider how much images bloat data usage — as an HTML request is made for every image in the email. This means that image loading lags on poor connections, or doesn’t appear at all. Additionally, images mean more memory on the CPU, which contributes to slow responsiveness on devices.
Images turned off: not that many clients still make this the default, but for unknown senders it’s the status quo. If the email is all-image, nothing will show except for the alt-text. This is especially bad when you have CTA buttons that can’t be seen or everything that makes the buttons relevant disappears.
Language: by having text in images, recipients can’t use a text translator to find out what the email is about when it isn’t sent in their native language.
Search: by having all-image emails, someone who is looking for a specific keyword in your email can’t find it. So there goes your “useful” how-to instructions for new users!
Spam Trap: this may not be as common as it used to be (because clients are smarter than they used to be), but email clients still like to scan the content of an email. If the IP trust is low from a sender, it may automatically be sent to a spam folder because the client can’t determine what the email is about.
Stacked images: not all clients or devices stack images correctly — especially if the coding is off. So, if you are doing a lot of slicing, the images may come in weird places.
