Email marketing is a powerful tool to reach out to your customers and build relationships. It is also one of the most cost-effective ways to get in front of potential clients. Whether you are emailing an existing customer or someone who has signed up for your email list, email marketing can be highly successful when used correctly. One of the most effective ways to ensure your emails are a success is by using images in your campaign.
The visual factor can help you create an emotional connection with potential customers and increase click-through rates on links that will take people to your website or social media pages.
This blog post will explore five tips for using images in email marketing that will help increase engagement with your audience and bring new life into your email campaigns.
Stats and Facts for Visuals
- A study found that emails with images have a 47% higher click-through rate than those without.
- The ability to remember visual information is excellent for learning. The brain can retain 6x more information when presented visually than just by reading or hearing about something.
- 53% more people will respond positively when they see an email with images than those who don’t receive any visuals at all. That number jumps up to 77% for emails with videos included.
- According to a study by Quicksprout, content with relevant images gets 94% more page views than content without any imagery or visuals at all.
As you can see from these stats, including visual elements like images or even video content has proven results! The use of imagery plays a significant role in how well your email marketing campaign performs overall. So it’s essential to take advantage where possible while also avoiding mistakes along the way.
Choose The Right Image File Size
The first email marketing tip you need to consider when using images is choosing the right image file size. The email service provider you use to create email campaigns will have specific requirements for image file size, so make sure you know what those are.
This tip is important because most people don’t have the patience for slow-loading email images. If they notice that your message’s content isn’t loading or is taking too long to do so, it may cause them to delete the mail and even regard you as spam.
Good practice: The ideal height of pictures used in emails should be less than 200 pixels with a width of 600 pixels. To see how it appears on different devices, test the email before sending it out to customers.
Use Images Of Real People
If email marketing is about one-on-one communication, then the image you use should be as real and genuine as possible. For this reason, it’s a good idea to avoid using professional models or stock images that are too polished in favor of photos of people who represent your target audience. The more relatable they are, the better!
Images can help add credibility to your email campaign by showing human faces instead of just logos and text links. Try asking your customers to send photos of themselves using the products and services that they bought from your company. You could also mention that if a picture is selected, it might be featured in future emails.
If none of these ideas work out for you business-wise, why not hire photographers (or go yourself) to take pictures during photoshoots? It’s worth allocating time and money because such beautiful visuals will help show what makes up your company’s culture and brand.
Make Use Of Stock Images
Stock images are a simple way to add visual appeal and increase conversions. Even if you’re not a design expert, there’s no excuse for using a non-stock image in your emails when free sources like Unsplash exist.
When using stock photographs for an email marketing campaign, make sure the images are royalty-free and follow all copyright rules. If not, there is a chance it could get in trouble with lawsuits—and severely hurt your brand identity.
Moreover, ensure your images are unique and won’t be considered overused or overexposed. Find stock photos that aren’t generic to make the most out of them. Don’t forget to look for images that are adequately cropped and of high quality. Don’t just use the first image you find when looking online.
Choose Correct Image Format
Not all email clients are compatible with specific image formats. For example, the most widely used email client software is Microsoft Outlook, but it does not support GIF images. Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem, and you can choose from many different file types when creating your email campaign, such as PNG or JPEG files, which work well in email marketing campaigns.
Knowing which one to pick will depend on your intended outcome of the image and its use. Each format has its strengths and weaknesses depending upon how they’re best utilized within a marketing campaign.
JPEGs are the most compressed image format and take up the least space while having fast loading times. JPEG images have a low quality compared to other formats, but it is compensated by a smaller file size so that you won’t get blocked or filtered due to too much spam content in your emails.
PNG images are a great format if you want to keep your photos looking colorful and sharp, but they tend to have slow load times. They work best with pictures that include text or logos because the image quality needs to be high for those features.
GIFs are animations that don’t use video but instead rely on a series of images. GIFs allow creators to showcase their creativity without worrying about email clients not allowing videos or taking up too much space in an attachment. They have faster load times due to being smaller than PNG or JPEG files without as many colors.
To ensure that images load quickly on people’s screens, we recommend using JPEG for loading rapidly and PNG if the text is included within the image. GIF is also a good alternative when animated content needs to be embedded in an image instead of videos which should only be used as alternatives whenever desired.
Include Alt Text
One of the most underused email image elements is alt text. On some email clients that support images, when a user opens an email with images turned off, they will still see a “placeholder” space where the image would be if it were available to them.
If you have used any email marketing software before, then one can bet that your opt-in form or call-to-action probably has some sort of placeholder text saying something like “Email Address” (or whatever). Well, this same concept applies to using alt text in emails as well! Not only does including appropriate and appealing visual content go a long way, but also writing proper copy to describe what your imagery could represent goes just as far.
Alt text ensures that every visitor on your site has equal access to content, especially those with impaired vision who rely on screen readers to “read” and interpret a web page using synthesized speech or braille displays.
Conclusion
The visual factor is a critical component of any successful email marketing campaign. And while it’s easy to throw together an image or two, the right ones can lead to improved engagement and conversions (which are what you want!).
To get started with your campaigns, we recommend looking at these five tips for using images in email marketing that industry experts have proved. Contact us if you need help implementing them!
