30% of your recipients don't even know your images are missing
Posted by David Greiner on November 22, 2006
I just checked out the results of an interesting study by Epsilon Interactive on the impact image blocking is having on email users today. We've written about the best approaches to working with image blocking before, but I though these stats would interest some of you:
69% of email users know how to activate suppressed images, and 57% at least sometimes activate images in promotional messages from senders they buy from or have accounts with, or from senders to whom they’ve given their permission to send them email.
Good to know a large portion of email users are aware of this, but 30% of your recipients who don't even know your images are missing is still a pretty concerning number. To me this only echoes the importance of ensuring your email looks good and is still completely functional even with images disabled.
I'd also recommended checking out Mark Wyner's very handy technique for making the most out of this situation and by displaying fully styled fallback text when images are not visible.
2 comments so far
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Damien
wrote on November 22, 2006 11:01 AM
Well spotted David, we've been using the same techniques since we first saw Mark's Digital Web Magazine email design. Whats more we've carried these techniques through to every website we've designed since as well as email - in my opinion, unless you need image transparency for your design, its a big improvement on other image replacement techniques.
Joel
wrote on December 8, 2006 8:17 AM
Going so far as to replacing each image with a note saying "Please download images" or something to the same affect feels like it could give some good results - but then how do you get around problems with Gmail that doesn't allow the background images?
Got anything to add?