This is terrible advice for emailers.
"Be sure to have image viewing enabled! In Gmail, click "always display images" at the top."
This little piece of wisdom comes from an email marketer who should know better.
I turned off automatic image display in all my email apps years ago.
The reason is to prevent tracking and hacking by bad actors.
The images have to come from a third-party source via a link and, as such, can be tracked and hacked.
Software can be installed and run in the background while the image is being loaded and displayed.
Since then, though, recipients of image-laden emails are more likely to see the image and not read the email because they get so tired of images that their actions are tick and flick.
It's an extension of the banner blindness that all marketers are familiar with.
Facebook, TikTok, et al. can also be held responsible for this.
Constantly scrolling through images on those platforms without pause means your emails will get the same treatment.
The other argument against having images in your emails is that email platforms like Gmail are more likely to flag your emails as spam or promotional and are less likely to hit the primary inbox.
I understand that some email newsletter writers think they need images in their emails, but I suggest they would be better served by writing a compelling summary of the content and sending a link to a web page instead.
It depends on what you think is more important, email delivery or a pretty email.
The bottom line is that you should send plain-test, rich-text or html that looks like text emails.
Leave the images for the inexperienced marketers and paint word pictures instead.
Regards,
Brent.
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P.P.S. Yes, I do know that Substack sends you an email that includes the image.
I haven’t worked out how to stop that yet, but the image is on the webpage, not baked into the email.
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