Why would you send me an email full of graphics?

Are you involved in email marketing? If you are, then this blog is all for you ...

Dear Email Marketer:
Please, please, please don't send me another email that is full of nothing but graphics. Sure, it looks pretty if I take the time to download all of your images. But, let's face it, I'm not going to.

Good old Microsoft Outlook - which dominates corporate email systems, and probably has a very high market share of personal email as well - does not by default load all your images. So, when your email lands in my inbox I just sit and stare at your blank looking email. I have a choice to make. Delete? Download? Delete takes about .5 seconds. Download takes about 5 seconds to load the images and then peruse your email before I delete it (because, honestly, I'm already in that mindset now that I have to download the good bits).

So - either way, I've deleted your email.

How can you make your email so that it is more likely that I'll read it. TEXT. TEXT. TEXT. Did that message come through? Put your important message in text in the body of the email. You can surround it all you want with pretty images and branding. I don't care about that. And, why should you care if I care? Your job is to get me to read your email and take action because of it.

So, to summarize:

• Fill your email with text
• Avoid and minimize the use of graphics
• Make the email work on its own without the graphics (i.e. who is it from, why should I care, what action should I take, why should I take action now)
• Add some graphics as necessary (e.g. your branding).

Thanks in advance for helping me to read your email.

Yours truly,
Dave Jones
VP Marketing and Sales
MarketGoGo.com