Building Emails with Images

To create effective marketing emails, it's recommended to use a balanced combination of text and images, ensuring that your message is clear, accessible, and appealing to a wide range of recipients, regardless of their email client, internet speed, or accessibility needs. 

Sending just an image in a marketing email can be potentially problematic for a few different reasons:

Accessibility

Many recipients may have visual impairments or use email clients that don't display images by default. If your email relies solely on images, these recipients won't be able to access your content, which can result in a missed opportunity to convey your message. This is especially an issue with the Outlook application, which often downloads images separate from the text content of an email if the sender is not in the contact's saved or safe senders list. Some email clients also block images by default to protect users from potentially malicious content. In such cases, your email's message may be entirely invisible unless the recipient manually selects the image to be displayed, which many users may not do. 

Loading Speed

Emails with large images may take longer to load, especially for contacts who experience slower internet or view emails on mobile devices. Slow-loading emails can frustrate recipients and lead them to delete the email without seeing its content. Additionally, on smaller mobile screens, images might not display correctly, leading to a poor user experience. If the image contains important text, it may become too small to read on a mobile device. When the text is entered in as a text block and converted out to HTML, the HTML will respond to the device the email is being read on, and be able to adjust appropriately. 

Spam Filters

Email service providers and spam filters may flag emails with too many images or predominantly images as suspicious. This can result in your email being sent to the recipient's spam folder or blocked altogether.

Limited Tracking

With DonorDock, we have the ability to track links that have been clicked in an email. If the email sent is just an image, with no links, the possibility of tracking link engagement is limited. 

Keeping these points in mind, there is nothing to stop you from loading pre-created content as images onto a draft email and sending it, however, if that is the only information contained in the email, it may potentially cause issues.