Email Marketing News and Tips

As an email marketer, we know you’re looking for an edge in your email marketing campaigns. As a result, here is a tip to help you in writing HTML that’s effective and works in a wide variety of browsers to get your content viewed by the widest audience possible.

Small history of HTML email

Stepping back a few years in time, the first browsers to hit the market were text based browsers such as Lynx. This browser was incapable of rendering images, but allowed command line browsing. Later after graphical browsers began to appear, the alt tag inside the IMG tag was created so that whenever an image couldn’t be rendered, the text placed into the alt tag would show instead in text-based browsers. Much later, email readers came along which also began supporting HTML. You’re probably asking, why is this important as all browsers and email readers today support images. For browsers, this is true to a point. For email readers, this was true up until phishing and privacy a factor (we’ll discuss Phishing in a later blog article). The idea behind the alt tag was originally for compatibility. Today, it’s taken on a different role. Using these tags allow the widest audience access to your email content.

Why ALT tags are important in images

Alt tags were created to allow you to specify what will appear in place of the image should the image not display. Many email readers today prevent the viewing of images until the user clicks ‘Load Images’. So, what the reader will see in their email reader, instead of an image, is the alt text tag until they load the image. So, the alt tag is actually quite important and more relevant today than ever.

When you’re composing your HTML for your email, it’s worthwhile to use the alt tags to specify relevant information when inserting images. This is especially relevant in HTML documents that contain mostly images. Remember that not every user will be reading your email using a browser that shows your images.

What to place in alt tags

When creating your alt tags, you should keep in mind what the image itself contains. If your image is a marketing slogan, then you probably want to repeat that slogan in your alt tags. However, if you are using 6 images as a mosaic to make up one big image, then you may not want to define alt tags for every image. In this case, you may want to specify only one tag to cover the entire 6 image mosaic. But, if you’re using 6 independent images (not in a mosaic), then you should tag each one of these images.

How to place the tags inside Blastwizard

There are two image gallery buttons in Blastwizard. One of these buttons has a small black triangle pointing to the right. This icon is for uploading of images into your Blastwizard home directory. The second icon just to the immediate right of that icon is the insert button. The insert button allows you to check box all relevant images from the upload gallery and let you insert them into your document at once at once. Additionally for each image, you can also select them individually and add alt text and a long description field as well as other information related to the image before insertion into the document.

How the alt tags are rendered

Alt tags are rendered as text in the same way the image would be. That is, if you wrap an A HREF tag (link) around the image, then the alt text will also become a clickable link. It’s important to remember this when composing your HTML document.

Text version vs. HTML version

You’re probably now asking, why is this an issue when you’re also including a text version of the email in your campaign. In fact, there are three versions of your document that can be viewed:

1. Full HTML version
2. Simple HTML version (usually the HTML version rendered without images)
3. Text version

Many email marketers don’t understand that there is really a third version that also can be viewed. So, you want to design your content so it can be viewed properly under all three conditions. There are email readers, such as Thunderbird, where the user can choose the way the content is viewed (Text, Simple HTML or Full HTML). The text version is only rendered if the browser is incapable of parsing HTML at all or if the user chooses to view the content this way. So, your content may be viewed incorrectly if you don’t fully plan for the all three versions.

Testing your HTML

It’s very important to test your HTML content in several different email readers before you run your campaign. If you have access to web based email clients such as Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Hotmail, it is also recommend you view your email content there to prevent unexpected issues. Thunderbird is a very good email reader for viewing all three versions of your content (Full HTML, Simple HTML and Text) so you can see how each version looks before launching your email marketing campaign.

Conclusion

It’s important to consider that while designing your content, you want to maximum readership possible. In that goal, you want to use alt tags to describe all of your included images. This aids readers in viewing relevant content no matter which version their client chooses to show them.