While the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” rings true in many contexts, when it comes to email marketing, that might not be the case. An email with only images and little to no text might be communicating nothing to your subscribers, or worse, not even landing in their inboxes due to a variety of factors. Yes, these emails may look great, but here’s why we don’t recommend it as an email marketing strategy.

6 reasons your image-heavy emails might not yield results

 

1. The image won’t load. For someone with images turned off, all they’ll see is a big empty box of white space below the subject line.
2. The text isn’t searchable. If your subscriber decides to search their inbox later or wants to find something in one of your emails, they won’t be able to locate it easily within their inbox.
3. It could trigger spam filters. Email providers like Gmail or Yahoo may block it.
4. It may not be accessible to people using screen readers. Screen readers can’t decipher text in an image so if there’s important information in the image, those subscribers won’t find out about it.
5. On mobile devices, images are resized to fit the smaller screen. This might result in tiny text which subscribers will have a hard time reading.
6. If it’s a large file size the email will load slowly. With short attention spans, anything that takes longer than a few seconds to appear is too long, and you risk losing your captive audience.

Strike a balance

 

Using image-focused emails may seem like a good idea because of how visually appealing they can be, but a better approach is a mix of attention-grabbing text and engaging visuals. Marketers can get that balance using a tool like Acoustic Multichannel Composer.

Multichannel Composer offers an intuitive interface that enables high-quality messages to be created across channels without relying on coding or developer support. Plus, with Acoustic’s embedded AI you can ramp up your creative process to add engaging text to accompany your visuals.

Our Acoustic Connect team can help you create effective email marketing campaigns that bring together high-quality images with engaging text to make stronger customer connections. To learn more strategies to step-up your email marketing, check out our book How to make email work even harder for you, or watch our instant webinar replay Driving results through email: Maximize deliverability and engagement.