News

Study: Image-heavy emails not getting through

June 5, 2008

Online Media Daily: It's back to the drawing board for marketers, whose image-oriented email campaigns are increasingly being blocked by default and Web mail clients. A new study from the Email Experience Council, the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association, found that 23 percent of retailers send emails that are completely unintelligible when images are blocked. Of the 77 percent that sent intelligible emails, there were significant variations in clarity based on their use of HTML text and alt tags. Only 42 percent of retailers designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63 percent of retailers used alt tags on their images adequately or extensively. A marketer's use of HTML text and alt tags are major determinants of the intelligibility of their emails.