Why I don't include photos in my email campaigns.

About Emails

Christopher Wray

I send email campaigns for our company and a client. Our open and click percentage rates average, for both companies, are well above the industry standards for both accounts. And over the past year, the open rate for my client has been steadily improving, as we focus on the core group of customers they have.

My Clients Open and Click Rate Averages on Mailchimp


Both lists are pretty small when compared with other companies, but the average is still the average, and I think our rates are pretty good!

Last year, I decided to no longer include photos in our email campaigns and I have seen that since we made that change, the percentage of opens and clicks rise each time I send an email.

There is a major reason why I stopped including pictures in our emails and it is simply spam.

People HATE spam and when you include photos in your email campaigns, no matter which email provider you use, your emails will look 100 times more spammy!

The reason why, is that most professional business owners use Outlook for their email service. Some use Gmail, but a great percentage use the Outlook desktop app to read and send email.

Outlook is a great service, and one of the ways they help protect their users is by blocking some images from senders automatically. (if the image isn’t attached.)

If your email depends on pictures throughout, and is unreadable (in a sense) without your images, then your email will look super spammy to users.

For an example, I’ve included an email I got below from Product Hunt, a huge start up platform:

Screenshot of Spammy Email


As you can see, basically the entire email doesn’t even resemble a normal email. It looks more like a spam website trying to steal your information, especially since Outlook states at the top that they’ve prevented automatic downloads of some of the pictures “to help protect your privacy”.

Wooh! What does that even mean? Will they send a robot onto my computer and read all of my emails somehow? Not even close, but it sure looks dangerous.

That is why I don’t add photos to emails anymore.

I write my marketing emails just like I would write any other email, with a greeting, some important information, and a closing. Our audiences have seemed to enjoy it that way, and it is really all that’s needed.

Ultimately, an email is just that, an email. They were never made to be fancy web pages, and we shouldn’t make them that way.

March 11, 2019

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