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Just 2 years ago e-marketers where sending email marketing messages made up entirely of high-gloss images superbly manipulated by highly paid graphic artists.

The email marketing landscape has since shifted. Email clients such as Outlook, Eudora, LotusNotes, Yahoo and Gmail all now come with image blocking as standard and the days of the single image as your entire message are now over.

The main reason for image blocking by email clients is to stop pornographic images from automatically opening when you're reading your email. Blocking images also prevents spammers from knowing if their messages are opened and verifying that your email address is real.

For legitimate email marketers there are implications too -

• Open rates appear lower than they actually are.
• Advertisers experience lower click through rates from banner ads in your email messages.
• Text and any copy included in an image doesn't get read.
• PDA, mobile phone and other mobile device are being built so that messages are displayed in plain text only.

So what can you do about it?

Here's 10 smart things you can do to make sure your messages get seen (and read) by your subscribers as you intended.

• Ask your subscribers to add your email address to their address book (some email clients will display images in the message if it comes from a known sender).
• Always provide a link to a web version of your email message (the option to view the complete message via a web browser is perceived to be a safer option than opening with an email client).
• Before you send your message, check to see what it looks like with images blocked (don't rely on images in your message to do all the selling - a text call to action is a must in your messages).
• Always create a plain-text version of your message (everyday more people turn to their mobile phones for reading email, so don't miss the sales opportunity).
• Double up on links. If you have an image that is a link make sure you also have a text one (the more links in your message the more likely one of them will be clicked on, either with or without images being displayed).
• Don't waste the top left corner of your message with an image banner or logo (preview panes, irrespective of whether they're set up to display horizontally or vertically, have a 2 - 4 inch box in the top left corner of your message that is guaranteed always to be seen - use this space to get people to open your message and read it).
• Use the top 2 inches of your message to get to the point (create a box for special links like 'view as a web page', 'update your subscription' and 'unsubscribe' in a prominent position that isn't in the valuable top 2 inches).
• Use smaller images and text to create your message, rather than one large image that also has your call to action in it (when the image isn't displayed there's no call to action for your subscriber to act on).
• Refrain from using images as decorative elements like bullet points (with images blocked the message will display with lots of little red crosses every where an image is supposed to be displayed - it is confusing and looks terrible).
• Give your images an alternative description, also called 'alt value' (good alt values provide a call to action, describe what the image is of or give an explanation - entice and describe as briefly as possible).

For e-marketers, image blocking is just another thing to consider when designing messages. It's not something that's going to go away in a hurry and trends with PDAs and mobile phones suggest that image blocking is the way of the future.

So grab the ideas from this article and begin implementing them in your messages to get the best out of every message you send.

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