With the hundreds of emails that I receive on any given day, an email looking like this would get passed over very quickly in my inbox.

With so much competition in a person’s email inbox, it is critical to design your email to be effective with images on and off. With the images turned off, the majority of the email above does not tell a reader who it's from or what's the call to action.

Let me walk through an example that highlights the potential impact.

 > One in five emails is invisible and ineffective due to blocked images.
    - Email Experience Council (Jan 2007)

> Let's apply the statistic above to a mailing with 1 million delivered messages. 
    - 800,000 delivered with images on
    - 200,000 delivered with images off / blocked

> Assume 50% of emails with images off / blocked were opened.
    - 100,000 total emails potentially looked over in your readers' inboxes.

In this example, wouldn't you want to have an extra 100,000 people read your email? Especially when this can be easily accomplished by tweaking your template so it still offers valuable information when images are turned off.

In terms of ROI, a few small adjustments to your emails will allow you to see improvements across every category.

By Peter Norton

The other day, I was discussing email templates with a client, and the discussion turned to the proper mix of images and text. The generally agreed upon best practice here is to have a 50/50 mix of images and text for promotional emails. All this talk of text vs. image ratios got me thinking about the roles a well-designed image has on the success or failure of an email. Sort of like an Oreo cookie, is it better to have equal portions during each bite, or to start with one side and finish with the other?

The email template linked here provides a good example for exploring this question further. The image they use is a good sampling of what this company sells. The image is crisp, clear and reflects the title of the image “Coastal Living Collection” (hence the boat and water in the background).

So, does the text to the left of this email do the image on the right injustice and take away from the great display? Would less verbiage on the left side with a simple message that drove them to the web site be better? This is where the fun comes in as marketers. Instead of guessing, make some variations of this template and send the tests to a sampling of your list.

One thing that I find when talking to marketers is that they often mention that they test on a regular basis or are in the midst of complete redesigns. However, when I dig deeper, the testing is with the subject line 9 out of 10 times. And why complete redesigns? Often, with some minor tweaks and further testing, stale templates that have shown excellent success in the past, are now again performing beyond expectations.

Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes complete redesigns are necessary, but you should first look at what you have and try some tests.