Six Ways to Overcome Image Suppression in Email Marketing

You’ve seen it hundreds of times before: the dreaded red X. The one that sits accusingly in the corner of an image that’s failed to appear in your email message. Too many email marketers’ efforts to make their emails “pop” with imagery have been destroyed by the dreaded red X.

It’s called image suppression—a feature designed to protect recipients from unknown senders, like spammers, who use images and links to verify users’ email addresses. You may have even witnessed it (and the best practices for overcoming it) in the TrueInsight email that brought you here today. While not new, it continues to be one of the biggest challenges to creativity in email marketing today.

This is especially true for B2B marketers who are forced to deal with a variety of email clients that are notorious for image suppression—particularly Outlook 2003 and Lotus Notes. In her recent article “Image Blocking Scorecard—Part 1,” email expert Jeanne Jennings conducted an informal test of the emails she received in her own Outlook 2003 inbox. She found that “one B2C email had 12 blocked images in the preview pane alone! On average, 2.5 images were blocked per message.”

The numbers are staggering—and important. If you’re still relying heavily on images to boost your email marketing efforts, odds are your message isn’t being fully communicated—and your response rates are taking a dive as a result.

But can image suppression actually work to your advantage? In his blog “Getting to the Inbox,” email expert Chip House says yes: “The fact that images are suppressed is forcing us to think a bit more about our main message. If you have to boil down your images into a few key words and phrases…that is actually a good exercise to go through!”

In other words, put down the pictures and pick up your pen (or, in this case, your keyboard). The best email marketers know that the words you use are essential to overcoming image suppression and, more importantly, compelling subscribers to take action. As such, it deserves the appropriate attention.

While by no means an exhaustive list, let’s take a look at six essential elements you need to consider when faced with image suppression:

Headlines
Image headers are a big risk. After all, if your recipients don’t know what your email is about, why should they even bother reading it? Be sure to feature an HTML text headline, title, or call to action at the top of your email.
Body Copy
Distill your message into a brief, compelling teaser that compels the user to take action— like downloading your images, or better yet, completing a transaction. Bonus points for getting your point across in the preview pane. Many readers don’t look beyond it.
Calls to Action
Your big “Buy Now!” button isn’t going to work if subscribers only see the aforementioned red X in its place. Make your calls to action text-based links instead.

Alt Tags
Alt tags are brief text phrases you can program to appear in place of images that cannot be displayed. Use your alt tags to restate your brand name/URL (www.truepresence.com) or key offer (“Buy one, get one free!”).

Whitelisting Requests
Adding a reminder to your subscribers to add you to their whitelist (or approved senders list) gives you two benefits: it keeps your email out of their spam folder and it disables the image suppression function in many email programs, like Outlook 2003, which allows images from senders that appear in recipient’s contact list.

“View Online” Links
Don’t get us wrong—switching to plain-text emails won’t solve all your problems; research indicates that HTML emails still outperform text. But you can provide your readers with a small “View Online Version” link at the top of your message. That gives your readers the option to view the email in all its glory as a web page.

Of course, the power to overcome image suppression ultimately resides in the hands of the end subscriber. They have the power to download your images or, better yet, whitelist your emails—but only if your content gives them a compelling reason to do so. Substance over style will win them over every time.

Tags: b2b marketers, b2c, email clients, email marketing, informal test, jeanne jennings, key words, lotus notes, marketing efforts, preview pane, recent article, red x, response rates, scorecard, senders, six ways, taking a dive