How Image Blocking Affects your Email Open Rates

Sometimes there are marketing methods that do not seem to make sense on the surface, but for some reason work. Here are three concepts that fit this description; poor open rates are good.

Lets tackle this assumption, that lower email open rates can be a positive thing.

Michael Thom recently surveyed major webmail and email clients to find that almost all of them now automatically block images in email. What does this have to do with open rates?

To drive response in an email environment where images are frequently blocked, we can make sure that headlines, key links, calls-to-action (CTA) etc. are still visible when images are suppressed. The better job you do in driving response when images are blocked, the less likely people are to unblock those images. If your message and CTA is clear when images are not enabled, why would the email reader bother to enable images and thus trigger an open?

This may mean that a poor open rate indicates a bad subject line, a weak offer or delivery problems. Or alternatively, it might just mean you're very good at designing email for blocked images.

This focuses on a little-discussed problem with email open rates: they are easily manipulated by outside factors which may not have the same impact on more important metrics. If you want a higher open rate, for example, send people a high value coupon via email, and put the coupon number in an image. Open rates will rise as everyone disables image blocking to get their the coupon. But the ROI on that campaign probably wouldn't make sense. That's why you need to look at your end goals to properly judge the success of a campaign.

It gets even more complicated, the further you look. For example, let's say your message is unclear without the images  appearing properly. If you have a track record of interesting content/offers, the email is well targeted, the subject line is promising and you arouse enough curiosity using image alt attributes etc., then people may be more apt to activate images.

If your subject line is vague, the relationship to the recipient weak and the mail poorly targeted, then people will be disinclined to enable images.

Recipient reader actions are a response to the total impact of all the different factors that add up to the email experience. And the impact of any one factor might change from case to case, depending on the unique factors impacting that one specific email.

Which is why, for example, it is not acceptable to say image rich emails always get lower responses in an era of default image blocking. Because under the right circumstances, image rich emails can outperform emails crafted for image blocking.