Email Marketing Use of Images Tips

The use (or overuse) of images in a direct email marketing piece can be the difference between successfully engaging your target customers or not.  Too big or too many, can cause your customers' "eyes to glaze over" and they will miss out on ALL of your message. You could potentially lose your customer, not only for that piece, but possibly completely.  Too small or too few images and you may cause your customer to have to work too hard, which could lead to an opt out as well. So what then is a best practice? Our friends at MyEmma tell us:

"In the email marketing industry, the adage is true: Less is more. And this is nowhere more true than when it comes to images in your emails. It may be tempting to splash your email with every image you created in Photoshop or mined on Google Images, but it’s better to practice restraint. Email benefits from simplicity and ease over complexity and bulk. After all, your email is being delivered to hundreds or thousands of inboxes that have their own way of rendering your campaign. If your images are too large or too many, your email runs the risk of being blocked or, even if it reaches the inbox, being poorly rendered."

So do you just "right click" and pull images you like on the web?  Do you pay big money to have a professional take photos for your piece?  Regardless of how you go about it, the use of images is AT LEAST as important as the content you include.  Here are a couple of suggestions:

"Guarantee that your campaign’s images look good no matter where they end up by adhering to a few best practices:

• Avoid mega-sized images. Large images take longer to load and cause problems if your campaign becomes too big in terms of file size. 40KB is about as large as any single image should be, and 480 x 480 pixels or smaller is our recommendation for an image’s length and width.
• The more images in your campaign, the smaller each image should be. Visual symmetry is key. If you’re using Emma’s simple layouts, we recommend images of 480 x 480 pixels or smaller. A newsletter layout works well with images that are about 240 x 240 pixels. Our advanced layouts tend to be most successful with images that are around 120 x 120 pixels.
• Limit the number of images in the campaign. Our layouts have 10 or fewer image placeholders for a reason: More than 10 images may result in an email file size that’s too large for servers to digest. Additionally, too many images serve as a distraction to your email’s content. If you have more than 10 images, consider creating a landing page to further content, or save content for a part II installment."

At Clocktower Media, we are committed to working with you to help you accomplish your direct email marketing goals using our Email Designer program. Check out www.emaildesigner.com to get more information.