Click To Download Images…Arghh!

I met a young executive at a conference last month who had already begun her e-mail marketing initiatives. As she was fine tuning her campaign her team had one question. Below was my response to her. I hope you will find it useful as well. As always, I encourage you to share information with my readers. If you have anything to add, please leave a comment.

Question
Do you find that often when sending HTML e-mail campaigns, depending on the e-mail service provider, that people have to click to download the pictures (red x)?

Answer
Unfortunately you as the sender of the e-mail do not have control of the download issue. That is actually a setting in Outlook. It is activated or deactivated by the individual user. You can however educate your e-mail distribution list on how to activate the auto download of images as most of them do not know how. Read Email Safe Send Instructions>>

Incorporating the tip below can increase your chances of eliminating the red x issue. But as I said before, the recipient is the one who ultimately decides if they want to enable images automatically or not.

Tip: Improperly referencing your images can cause them to appear broken when you send your message—the dreaded red x. To insure the image is referenced correctly it must appear as, img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com….” rather than, img src=”/images/picture.jpg”. Alt tags are another important part of your images. The new security features on almost every e-mail client these days disables images automatically. Having alt tags in place allow your reader to identify the image and determine if it is safe to enable.

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