Marketers and Blocked Email Images
June 11, 2008 1 Comment
“Over 50 percent of images in promotional emails are routinely blocked by email and webmail programs, says a recent survey by the Email Experience Council (eec), the email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), writes MarketingCharts.”
This article states that 57% of these campaigns are almost completely image based. These campaigns are likely to have a higher catch rate by spamfilters and anti spam counter measures deployed on the local computer. Not to forget that most email clients now turn off showing images in the email body from external online sources for security reasons.
Now, take out an standard Spamassassin installation with the default rules and analyse some emails with text/images and image only based email. You will notice that Spamassassin will give the image based only email some extra scoring. The email with text and images will have a lower scoring. The lower scoring could have as a result that the message gets delivered while the image only based email is placed in quarantine or being blocked as spam.
Marketeers need to be aware of the fact that image based email is often confused with spam email. Spam is also quite often only image based.
Another point is the fact that images in email clients aren’t shown by default when the message is received as this is a security feature of the email client. In this case, the message that you want to deliver as marketeer or e-campaign administrator isn’t viewable for the receiver.
Personnaly, when I receive image based only email I think it can’t be interesting, there is no content, and therefore it gets deleted.
Marketeers, and everyone else who sends newsletters or email based campaigns, needs to be aware of certain points to pass by any spam filters, get the email to the inbox and attract the receivers attention. This can only be done by offering content and information with a balance between the text and image parts. This results in building a much more complex HTML email template and some additional testing but it will be worth the effort.
Good Post. For me the issue isn’t spam filtering, we test that before we send out our client’s campaigns. What the real problem is that lack of feedback in the form of open rates because the technique used is to have an image retrieval request signify and open. This forces us to use trending as the means to show improvements to open rates, but that is for a completely different discussion.