The Silverpop Report on Missing Images and Broken Links

(Direct Newsline) More companies are now sending e-mail—HTML in particular—than in 2002. But the percentage of messages with missing graphics or broken links has stayed relatively the same, according to a study released by e-mail service provider Silverpop. “It’s quite a conundrum for marketers,” says Bill Nussey, Atlanta-based Silverpop’s CEO. “Just as broadband penetration begins to reach deep into American households, facilitating the display of rich imagery in e-mails, a growing concern about security and spam has caused new focus on blocking HTML images.”

According to Silverpop, 71% of companies it studied communicate to customers and prospects using e-mail now, compared with 30% in 2002. Also, 69% of the companies that communicate with customers and prospects via e-mail use HTML today compared to 47% in 2002. However, 40% of companies’ e-mails studied in 2002 contained missing graphics, compared to 42% in the 2002 study.

When Silverpop last did a survey on these problems in 2002, e-mailers were attempting to get around content filters–which look for key words such as ‘free” and “loan”—by placing their text in HTML images that the filters could not “read.”

But today the rise of phishing scams and fears of objectionable image content have led many e-mail programs to block those HTML images by default. HTML code can contain “Web beacons”, small amounts of code that will alert the sender that an e-mail message has been opened. This can serve as a notice to phishers that they have gotten control of a live e-mail address.

While the level of broken images has remained constant, the reason for the has shifted. “In 2002, we were looking at a relatively immature technology base among the e-mail clients,” Nussey says. “Now e-mail clients are incredibly sophisticated, but they’re trying not to display images. We’ve gone from accidental broken images being purposeful image-blocking. That creates a much higher hurdle for e-mail marketers who want to get their broken image rate below 40%.

“While HTML-based e-mail provides a richer product experience for consumers, the benefits that accrue from HTML are obviously lost if the images and links are not functional.”

To help combat the negative impact on marketers’ brands that broken e-mails can have, Nussey urged marketers to ask to be added to recipients’ address books.

“Not only will your messages arrive in inboxes with images intact, they’ll move through ISP filters with much greater reliability,” he says.

Other recommendations are to design messages so that they are compelling even without the images, and to include a “View as Web page” link in the e-mail so recipients can open a static version of the message in their browsers, where images are not blocked.