One of the good practices in email marketing is to have a newsletter with balance between text and images, but, we must choose the image and visual style of our content well to provoke the reader to interact with it.
Sending a newsletter in which you only see paragraphs and paragraphs of text, can make your reader stop reading, quickly send your email to the SPAM folder or simply delete your message. However, everything depends on your messages intention, and it is possible that if the wording is interesting, text-only content may still have a chance. But it is obvious that people are geared very visually, so images are vital elements of email campaigns.
Some reasons to include images in email marketing are:
- Emails with visual content are easier to consume, they do not require much effort to get the message across.
- Content with images are better received by the user, this includes both gifs and photographs.
- They capture the user's attention almost immediately.In your contact’sover-saturated inbox’s , you have a brief window of time to capture their attention, so content with integrated images in email marketing is one of the perfect ways to get it.
A study published by the firm Neilsen highlights that newsletter recipients expect to receive the same high quality images that they see on websites. Participants in their study said they "prefer high-quality, large-scale images that show details of the content clearly."
If the images are not used correctly they can be a double-edged sword, they should be shown responsively, be consistent with the content and be of good quality to effect the reader positively.
To avoid making mistakes in your next email, we will give you some tips for selecting images, errors to avoid and the formats you should use to add the perfect images for your email marketing campaign.
Common mistakes when using images in the newsletters
Images are a way to create the balance in the content of the message and thus avoid saturating the reader with amounts of text that will only tired their eyes and lead to the main message you seek to communicate, being wasted. Some errors that can hinder your newsletter from being received well are:
- Only images
Sending a newsletter where images are used excessively, may not only send a bad message to your reader, but it will affect your deliverability. Emails that only contain images or in which visual element predominate over the text, can be considered as SPAM by filters.
For this reason, it is important to maintain a balance between texts and images, one could say that it should be 60/40 text and image.
- Image is too big
One of the problems with using very large images is that there is a risk that the images in the email may not be displayed correctly or may take a while to load. In addition they will consume mobile user’s date.
Try to use images that do not exceed 1MB in size and that have a width of 600 pixels. You can use free online tools to reduce the size of images without losing quality. One tool you can use is TinyPNG, which will allow you to reduce the size of up to 20 files with the maximum weight of 5M each.
- Small images
According to Nielsen consultant’s report, users expect to see a newsletter where the images are well integrated into the content; placing the product images in small columns is not attractive. In comparison, it is expected to see images that have greater importance and aesthetic value within the content.
Another bad practice is to cut and lengthen the images just so that they can fit in the content. Before placing them in the template, cut them down to the size of the email template using the Mailpro image editor, that allows you to edit the images from the same template.
- Images that are not adapted to mobile
It’s no secret that a good portion of emails are read from mobile devices. This means that the images should be able to be displayed in a responsive format. For this reason, all the templates offered by Mailpro are designed to be displayed on mobile devices. When the time comes to design and select the image, you must have your final recipient in mind.
Imagine taking hours to create a design full of details but to see all of it, you have to scroll a bunch to reach the end. This would be very unpleasant to read. Always keep in mind how it your designs will be displayed on a mobile or tablet screen.
- Images that can’t be seen
It’s possible that even after choosing an image with a size and weight optimized for mobile , and have chosen the ideal image, it still doesn’t appear. That happens because there are email clients, browsers applications that block or show the images differently than in the emails. This happens frequently in the case of Outlook, where the image appears in white and only the title of the image is displayed.
In these cases, it is important that you use the ALT tag, adding the alt tag to the images will show the descriptive text of the image to give context to the subscriber of the image content. Do not place CTAs in images, it is recommended that you place them on buttons or add the link in the text.
You can read about "Why my campaign looks bad in Outlook" in our FAQs
Image file formats for Email Marketing
There are several formats that you can use in the design of your emails, each with its own special features and different ways of being viewed by email clients.
JPG for email
The format JPG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) is the most common format on the Internet, its popularity is due to the fact that it is a format that allows you to reduce its size up to 100 times without losing the color information. In this capacity, it is the right to share photos because it allows you to share images that are light and will not affect the email load.
But despite this strength, there are still disadvantages, as compression can bring about a loss in the quality of the image in photographs where there are large areas of color. If you work with illustrations, or images with texts, the loss of quality will be higher and the file will look pixelated. Also the JPG format does not support transparencies, if you have images with transparent backgrounds these will be displayed as a white background.
PNG for email
The PNG (Portable Network Graphic) format is another of the most well-known formats. Unlike JPG, it does not lose quality when it is compressed and supports images with transparent backgrounds. Its great disadvantage is the size of the file, as this can be even larger than the JPG format.
Another drawback is that browsers with older versions such as Internet Explorer up to version 6.0 can’t display that format correctly. So it is important to know where our subscribers read our emails. Remember, from Mailpro you can obtain clear statistical details by reading your messages through the software analysis tool, that will show you which operating system your messages are being read from.
How to include images in a Mailpro newsletter
There are two main ways to add images to your newsletter, uploading the image to the gallery or copying the image link.
- Image inserted in the email
Insert the image in the email and it will upload the image you select to your account gallery. In this way, you are attaching the image to the newsletter’s design, and are ensuring that the user receives the image and can see it when in offline mode. But, inserting images also has its disadvantages. Very large images can cause the email to be seen as spam, enlargen the size of the email and the parameters of certain email providers.
- Image link
Another option is to include images from an external source, that is, an online or web server. In this way, only the image link is copied and the newsletter is pasted. The advantage is that the size of the mail is smaller, and face time is decreased. The disadvantage is that if the server where your image is hosted has problems, the images will not be displayed correctly.
Adding images to the design of your emails is essential. Now that you know the importance of using images in email marketing, it's time to create creative emails that impact your readers.
Remember to follow email marketing good practices and also that you have our gallery of templates for newsletters, that will help you design creative messages.