E-mail’s Image Problem

Developments surrounding blocked e-mail images and links have been causing a great deal of consternation among marketers lately. However, experts say the growing trend is nothing to get confused or worked up about.

In June, Goodmail Systems announced its CertifiedEmail system had been adopted by Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner and Verizon.

As a result, six major e-mail inbox providers — the lone major exception being Microsoft — now support CertifiedEmail, including its original adopters Yahoo! and AOL.

Introduced last year, CertifiedEmail is a scheme in which senders undergo an accreditation process. Once certified as non-spammers by Goodmail, senders’ messages arrive in users’ inboxes with images and links intact and certified as safe by a blue-ribbon icon for a quarter-cent per message.

Prior to Goodmail’s announcement, AOL caused an uproar in e-mail marketing circles when it rolled out new versions of its AOL.com and AIM.com free e-mail services that automatically block images by default.

After conflicting reports circulated the Internet for almost a week on the circumstances that prompt AOL to block images, AOL spokeswoman Sarah Matin issued the following statement to clear things up: “All AOL e-mail users accessing e-mail through the enhanced AOL Web Mail service released on [May 22] will note that images from unknown senders are blocked. E-mail from addresses listed in your address book or sent as certified mail (or via other approved ways) are considered e-mail from ‘known senders’ and may contain live images or links.”

AOL’s move is part of an industrywide trend among e-mail inbox providers like Yahoo! and Microsoft, which turn images off by default in their newly designed e-mail interfaces to protect subscribers from spam, viruses and malware.

As a result, marketers have been watching their open rates plummet for some time. The reason for the drop is that an “open” is recorded when the receiving computer calls for images from the sending machine. If an e-mail is opened but the recipient doesn’t turn on the images, the open will not be recorded. Likewise, marketers no longer are getting the delusional benefit of e-mails that render in the preview pane without having been opened, but that register as having been opened anyway.

Hence, there currently is a lot of handwringing in e-mail marketing circles. Will marketers’ open rates fall even further as a result of increased image suppression? The short answer is: Probably. The smart answer is: It shouldn’t matter.

Calling the controversy over AOL’s recently implemented image suppression “much ado about nothing,” Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg says e-mailers who are doing the right things, such as making sure their reputations are stellar and designing their creative so the message comes across no matter what, shouldn’t be overly worried about suppressed images.

He also points out that even with CertifiedEmail’s expanded adoption, marketers can’t simply buy their way into people’s inboxes with images and links intact.

“The simple fact is that Goodmail has very high standards, so you can’t just walk in off the street with a big check and pay them for delivery. You have to qualify for it,” he says. “The bottom line is you can’t get in unless you already have such a high-quality program and such high reputation metrics (see sidebar, this page) that in many cases you’re getting inbox placement, images and links anyway.”

As a result, Blumberg says, Goodmail’s primary benefit is the trust icon. And indeed, according to Goodmail vice president of marketing David Atlas, the company plans to start an ad campaign in the fourth quarter aimed at getting consumers to think of CertifiedEmail icons as they do FedEx packages.

“People treat FedEx packages differently,” Atlas says. “What CertifiedEmail does is say, ‘Here’s the e-mail you requested. This is important.’”

In any case, the first thing a marketer must do to try to ensure outbound e-mail reaches its destination with graphics and links intact is keep spam complaints down. Unfortunately, there’s no rule of thumb.

“It’s different at every ISP, which is part of the problem,” Blumberg notes. “[Spam complaints] just need to be very low.”

It’s also important for senders to ensure their infrastructure is solid, he adds. “Authentication is critical now. ISPs are starting to do bad things to e-mail if it’s not authenticated. Also, make sure your servers are secure.”

And never, ever, ever harvest e-mail addresses from Web sites. “You shouldn’t even know what the word means,” Blumberg advises.

“The rest of it is making sure you get people on your list the right way, letting them get off when they want to get off, and sending them what you tell them you’re going to send them,” he says. “It’s all about building a relevant and engaging mail program. Companies that do it have good enough reputations that they can largely get into inboxes with images and links working.”

And so, he continues, e-mail image suppression is “nothing to get alarmed about as long as you watch your reputation metrics, maintain a high-quality [e-mail marketing] program, and design your e-mails so they work if images and links are turned off.”

Commercial e-mail should never be sent without so-called ALT tags, or text messages that appear in place of an image that’s been suppressed. This way recipients can see the offer and call to action whether the images are turned on or not.

“A lot of mailers still aren’t doing that, but they should,” Blumberg says. “Marketers should at least make sure the images don’t carry the message alone. They should be testing messages [sent to] e-mail clients with images disabled so they can see what it looks like.”

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