What to Avoid When Sending Template Emails

Last year I talked about how some of your emails may NOT be getting to your intended recipients and are probably ending up trapped by their spam filter or they are just hitting delete because the email looks weird.

The Original Article – Your Leads and Customers are NOT getting your emails

Here is an example of what your emails might look like if they get through. Click on the picture to see it full size.
bad email example

When you look at this picture you see a bunch of boxes that are placeholders for pictures located on a webserver. Why does it look like this? Because the pictures are not “in” the email but instead the email is formatted with links to pull the pictures off the internet.

Why is this bad?  Two Main Reasons.

The first reason:
Some email programs will not allow the pictures to load automatically due to security reasons and therefore you get this look if it even gets to my mailbox. The reason the pictures don’t load is because they are NOT in the email but instead linked to a server on the internet.

The second reason:
Because the email is basically full of links trying to download images your email has a HIGH probability of being flagged as spam and will either not arrive at all or make it into my Junk-Mail folder.

How do you avoid this problem?

When you create an email to send instead of your template using links to pictures in the email you should directly embed the pictures into your email.

The best solution would be to use just straight text and don’t get all fancy shmancy, then I might read your email.

Does my opinion on this matter? Yes.

Some of your recipients will not care but there will be many of the Gen X of Gen Y that will care. I am one of those Gen X’rs that will see this type of email and automatically hit delete with out thinking twice.

Loren Nason
Technology Coach

3 Comments

  1. Nick on February 7, 2008 at 6:25 pm

    What are your thoughts on providers like Constant Contact who do a decent job of defining the image size, so although the image may not load automatically, the formatting is still decent and the email isn’t butchered?

  2. Loren Nason on February 7, 2008 at 7:50 pm

    Constant Contact and Aweber are very good providers of mass email solutions.

    I still feel that your email should have no pictures unless the pictures are embedded in the email itself that way there are not any blanks

  3. Arlington VA Real Estate ? Jay on February 19, 2008 at 8:43 am

    Oh my. I’m going to need to reconsider how I’ve been doing some things signature and drip campaign wise. This is really depressing–haha

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