How Do Retail Email Marketers Approach Image Suppression?

On more than one occasion, we have discussed the importance of heeding image suppression and rendering when composing email campaigns. Because of the lack of HTML email standards, your lovely images (and more importantly your key message, call-to-action and preview content) probably won’t be seen in the preview pane of your recipients’ inboxes if images are suppressed by default. Currently, this is the case in about 50% of all email clients.

Today, Chad White published an interesting study that looks at how retail email marketers are dealing with image suppression and rendering issues which affect the display of HTML email.

Here’s an overview of his findings:

1. Only 42% of leading retail email marketers were using designs that balanced HTML image and text use, which is one way to combat image suppression problems.
2. 23% of emails received by those reviewed in the study were completely unintelligible due to image suppression.
3. Only 3% of retail email marketers surveyed use HTML call-to-action buttons rather than images.

For more a full summary of the study, read Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study

This is another reason why it is so important to test your campaigns against a variety of email clients prior to sending it out to your live list.