Email marketing has long been held as one of the most effective waysto communicate to your past, present and future customers. However, simply sending random emails is not effective and can lead to a higher rate of people opting-out of your email list
One of the ongoing questions business owners have is, "How much of the email should be images and how much should be text?"
The answer is different depending on your email marketing purpose. If your purpose is prospecting or sales, then studies have shown over and over again that text emails get much higher open rates than those that have a heavy amount of images.
If the purpose is a newsletter to past or existing customers, then a good balance of images and text work great!
The one thing that is for sure, is to not have an email that is solely images.
The reason for this is 3-fold:
1) Images take time to load
2) Images could be "turned off"
3) Higher chance of going to SPAM folder
Now I'll break this down.
1) Images take time to load
A client of mine sent me an email to proof before they sent it and no matter how many times I refreshed it I could not see the image. I finally asked the client to send me the code they used to build the email and found that the image they used was HUGE! The image was taking too long to load so my email client timed it out and wouldn't show it. Even if you have proper image sizes, if you have an email full of images it could take a while to load.
If your email is 100% images and it is taking a while to load, then our ADHD society will just delete it and move on to the next email!
2) Images could be turned off
Many mail clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Zoho, or Apple Mail default to have images turned off. What this means is when an email is sent, none of the images will show up. The reason for this is to allow faster loading of emails (see point #1).
If your email is 100% images and goes to someone's email, they won't see any of your email unless they click "Show Images" or "Display Images". They might do that, but only if they have a compelling reason to, like being intrigued by the text that they can see!
A large, well known company like IKEA could get away with something like this, but most small businesses can't.
Here is an IKEA example:
3) High chance of going to SPAM folder
Even if a person has opted in to your email list you can still end up in their SPAM. Many email clients automatically filter emails that are 100% images and put them in the SPAM folder.
If your email is 100% images, then you could be flagged by an email client.
So what's a good balance? At least 50-50 and many email marketers suggest 80% text and 20% images. It depends on what you are doing. If you are a company like IKEA who is trying to display their products then a higher ratio of images is needed than a Doctor.