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: Continue Reading…