Email Creative: What Works and What Doesn't

[mandy]

Imagine creating and sending a print mail piece only to find out that before delivering it, the U.S. Postal Service stripped out the graphics and put little symbols where pictures used to be.

Infuriating? You bet. And thanks to spammers, this is increasingly the case with e-mail. Inbox providers such as AOL and Google have been forced to block images by default, to prevent pornographic photos from assaulting unsuspecting subscribers and to stymie spammers' efforts to determine if the addresses they hit are real.

Morgan Stewart, director of strategic service for Indianapolis-based e-mail service provider ExactTarget, estimates that 10%-20% of e-mail images are not “rendering.” Image blocking is causing such havoc that the phrase “e-mail creative” might be considered an oxymoron. After all, if the inbox providers are blocking images, what can possibly be creative about it? Turns out, quite a bit....

full article: http://multichannelmerchant.com/webchann..._08012006/