Why you shouldn’t use big images in your email campaigns

We’ve all seen them and received them in our inboxes at one point or another;  emails from companies that are made up of one large image (whether this be physically one image or one image sliced into sections) or an email filled with lots of smaller images with no copy at all.  But if big companies are using this method why can’t I?

It is widely proven that using appealing images in marketing campaigns makes the piece look better and can increase conversions; showing the customer what they are buying for example.  However, using all images or one big image in your campaign is playing email Russian roulette for the following reasons:

• Most studies that you read show that anywhere between 40% and 60% of people receiving your email will look at it with the images turned off by default with the recipient needing to actively turn on image viewing in their email client to see your images.  If they do not do this, your important content will not be shown and all they will see is a blank gray box making it look like your message is broken – not very professional!  You should of course always add ALT text to your images but this does not replace the whole message that you want to get across.

• Servers are more likely to filter emails with large images, meaning the campaign will end up in the recipient’s junk folder rather than the inbox; so they may not see your message at all. Use images in your emails to enhance and entice, but not to convey the entire message. Always use a good mix of textual content to describe all the necessary details and explain your main message and call-to-action. Don’t forget that one of the major elements spam filters look at is your image to text ratio in the email. A good rule of thumb is to use a 70:30 rule; 70% of your email in text and 30% images.

• Large images can take a long time to load, and your recipients may move on to the next email in their inbox without viewing yours

• One large image can only link to one URL, limiting your ability to include links to multiple products, articles or specific landing pages to increase your conversion rate.  It also means that your ability to track your audience’s response to different products is negated.

In summary, don’t follow the crowd – they don’t always do it right!  Do it your way and get the best results you can from your email marketing campaigns.