Image-only emails – Why splicing emails is not a good idea

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A picture is worth a thousand words, and an animated GIF is probably worth even more. To grab the attention of your subscribers, email marketers are increasingly turning to image- or GIF-heavy email campaigns.

We can understand the appeal. These emails may look flawless. Their designs are immaculate, and the level of branding they offer is hard to beat.

However, image-only emails and the process known as email splicing come with many problems. This article explains what email splicing is, five reasons why email splicing is best avoided, and five tips on how to turn image-only emails into something better.

What is email splicing?

Image splicing is the process of creating emails by cutting up a large graphic into pieces and putting them together like a puzzle in the design. So if they look so great and drive home the visual branding win, what's the downside?

When you look at a beautiful email like this one in Outlook, it's empty – except for a small broken image icon, because all images (and therefore content and messages) are blocked by default.

Too bad, isn't it? But email client support issues are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with emails that only contain images.

Why are emails that only contain images a bad idea?

Image-only emails may look nice, but check out these five reasons why they're generally not a good idea:

• Image blocking
• Lack of responsiveness
• Inaccessible content
• Deliverability issues

Let us examine each of these issues in more detail below.

What effect does image blocking have on emails that contain only images?

A picture is worth a thousand words, but some of your subscribers or their email clients may have image blocking set up, meaning they can't see any of your well-designed email images.

As mentioned above, most versions of Microsoft Outlook block images by default. Since it is a very widely used email client, you need to take this into account. Unfortunately, no line of email code can override this. The only solution is to bypass Outlook's image blocking.

Here is a table of email clients that do not download images by default:

In addition to these default email client settings, some email clients provide their users with the option to disable images. If your inserted email's images aren't displayed, a reader won't be able to connect with or respond to your message.

How can emails that only contain images not be responded to?

Emails that consist of only images may not be responsive. That is, they may not be formatted correctly for mobile and may cause display issues. In the case of stitched images, they may stack on mobile devices, so the “puzzle pieces” of a stitched email that consists of only images would be completely jumbled.

In 2019, 60% of all emails were opened on mobile devices. If your email layout is messy on mobile, you risk losing engagement because your campaign becomes unreadable.

How can image-only emails cause accessibility problems?

Aside from the mobile UX issues, splitting up emails loses most of the meaning of your message to people who use screen readers like JAWS or digital assistants like Alexa and Siri to read emails. In other words, it makes it virtually inaccessible.

Screen reading software can only convey an image to listeners to a certain extent. It can only read an image's alt text, if there is any. This means that any text that doesn't contain live text is inaccessible to the subscriber. This includes calls-to-action (CTAs). If a CTA is on an image that the client blocks, that CTA will not generate clicks.

If the image is not displayed, the CTA will not be displayed either

Avoid putting your brand in a position where the ROI of your emails depends on whether a technical tool and a few lines of alt text resonate with the reader, and make your emails accessible with a mix of content.

Why does email splicing cause deliverability problems?

Stitching together emails that consist only of images brings with it a number of potential deliverability issues. Like digital assistants, spam filters cannot recognize the content of an image. This allows spammers and scammers to hide misleading content from mailbox providers.

All the receiving mail server knows is that the email consists of image files. Regardless of how secure the content is, this is a red flag and can cause your email to end up in spam folders rather than inboxes.

Although email clients do not make public the parameters of their spam filters that determine which emails are spam, we know that one such parameter checks the image-to-text ratio of an email. If a spam filter can read a block of text, it has some context to decide whether the email is safe to deliver. If it cannot even guess what the content is, it may activate its “why risk it” setting and redirect the email as spam.

What are five ways to improve an email that consists only of images?

So, to recap, you need to resist the temptation to design emails that are all images and then piece them together. It might look good to you, but it could be a terrible experience on mobile, emails that are all images can trigger spam filters, and they give screen reader users virtually nothing to engage with.

So let's say you have some image-only campaigns or stitched email graphics in your current program. What can you do to improve them? Here are some good suggestions:

• Add Live Text
• Add alternative text to images
• Keep the image size small
• Use bulletproof backgrounds and buttons
• A/B testing for image-only emails

Let us look at each of these points in more detail below.

Why is it important to increase the text-image ratio?

What can an email marketer do if images are not showing? Make your emails that only contain images more balanced. The age-old question is whether you should care about the text-to-image ratio in emails. We recommend keeping a 40:60 ratio between images and text as this will improve the readability of your email and help you avoid unnecessary deliverability issues.

Always use Live Text for your most important messages. This way, when images are blocked, important parts of the text are not obscured and screen readers can process the content.

Why should I add alt text to my images?

Alternative text (alt text) complements your images—especially if they're blocked by an email client or are slow to load. Think of alt text as “Plan B.” But the real reason to use alt text on non-decorative images is to describe images for screen readers to read aloud. According to Harvard's Accessibility Hub, the main purpose of alt text is to “explain the why of an image.”

Why is it a good idea to keep the image size small?

Combat slow loading times by keeping your image file sizes small. As mentioned above, spammers often use large files too. Don't be confused with spam and keep your files small.

Choosing the right image format will go a long way in keeping your images small. Not sure which format is right for you? In general, Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG or JPG) files are the smallest, while Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) files are quite large.

How can I use a bulletproof background?

Instead of using an image for your CTA or background, consider creating bulletproof buttons and bulletproof backgrounds. These backgrounds and buttons are “special” because they look like images, but they aren't. They are lines of CSS and HTML code designed to display in a variety of email clients.

Bulletproof buttons also include live text, which means contacts using screen readers will hear the call to action, greatly increasing the likelihood that they will click it.

How can I test the images in my emails?

Sinch Email on Acid offers a range of tools to test and optimize images in email campaigns. Our image validation feature helps you perfect the layout of images, reduce file size if necessary, and more. In addition, the accessibility checkers built into our platform remind you to add alt text to all your images.

These are just some of the ways our automated pre-send workflow, Campaign Precheck, helps marketers deliver perfect emails.

Wrap up

We know that images are important to your email marketing campaigns and that they are here to stay, but we hope you can use our tips and tricks to improve image-only emails and increase your open rates and customer conversions.

Not sure how your email design is performing? If in doubt, test it with Email on Acid. See what happens to your email deliverability, engagement, and metrics. Be sure to let us know what you find out in the comments!

This article was last updated on August 30, 2022. It was first published in December 2019.

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Author: The Email on Acid Team

The Email on Acid content team is made up of digital marketers, content creators, and real email geeks. Connect with us on LinkedIn, follow us on Facebook, and tweet us at @EmailonAcid on Twitter for more interesting stuff and great conversations about email marketing.

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