One of the questions I get from folks about delivery is what the optimal text to image ratio there should be in an email. I’ll be honest, I hate this question. Why? Because the question is actually irrelevant. I’ve seen companies with a single image and no text get to the inbox. I’ve seen companies with no images get to the inbox. The text to image ratio is not going to make or...
Late last year Gmail started caching images on their servers, breaking open tracking in some circumstances. This image caching was good for senders, in that images were back on by default. But it was also bad for senders because it broke dynamic content and didn’t allow for tracking of multiple opens by the same recipient. According to a new blog post by Moveable Ink this issue has now been...
It’s a new year, but an old problem. Email with unloaded images. Sure, you should be including critical content as text, and/or including alt-text as a normal part of your creative design process, but at the bare minimum you should look at what your mail looks like without images. The last thing you want to do is send out email with just one strong call to action – the unsubscribe...
Gmail released a blog post last week discussing their new image caching and why they implemented it. The short version is this is a way to improve the gmail user experience by screening images for malicious activity and serving the images faster from the Google caching machines.
A lot of people are discussing the new Gmail image caching around the web. This doesn’t yet appear to be rolled out across all of Google’s network, so some people in different parts of the world are reporting different behaviors. This is leading to a little bit of confusion, as folks are reporting things like seeing multiple opens for a single image. These reports are clearly...
This afternoon Justin Foster of LiveClicker posted to the OnlyInfluencers list asking about Gmail rewriting links. Sometime very recently (last 24-48 hours), we are seeing that Google made a change to Gmail such that all image URLs in the email content are replaced by a call to Google’s content caching service googleusercontent.com. For example, an image with the src: “; will be...
There’s an old-school ’90s HTML design trick that dates back to the dim and distant past before we had decent layout control in CSS. That’s “slicing” – chopping a large image up into multiple parts, then reassembling them in an HTML table. If you slice your images in an email and the end user hasn’t loaded images what will they see? They’ll see a...
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