Victim #3: Heard of auto-preview in Outlook?

Yet another email in my inbox that doesn’t perform with images disabled. This time it’s Thompson Cigar. Love ‘em but their emails are annoying. With a couple of tweaks they could improve their email response rates.

Take aways:

1) Nice effort to lead with text in the top left but test it and see what happens before sending. The auto-preview actually shows two image calls <img src=”…”> before the text offer. See below.

2) (two camps here) I say drop all the administrative text at the top. At least check to see if anyone is using it and then decide. What a mess. Some people say it’s necessary. I say it interferes with the primary message / call to action.

3) There are important calls to action in the images that are disabled. Change it up…

Here is the auto-preview in Outlook. The last stat I heard is that it is used by approximately 25% of those who use preview panes, which is about 60% of email recipients. See the two image calls before the offer that may have generated interest if one could find them:

The preview pane isn’t much better. The offer is really small and the rest is administrative text or images.

With images disabled there is very little live text to act on and important calls to action are missing.

When you enable images, you see important links like forward, share, email-only deals, and a new feature – the Daily Deal.

Related posts:

1. Victim #4: Send me relevant emails
2. Set the height and width of images in emails
3. HEY. Emails don’t perform with images disabled.
4. Move Compelling Content Up And Graphics Down To Win At Email