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Various sources state that about 70% to 80% of bulk e-mail campaigns are
in HTML format. The main reason why the majority of e-mail marketers choose
HTML over plain text is that you can use images, which are proven (at least
in many instances) to drive your sales up. But have you ever received HTML
e-mails where you the images weren't displayed correctly? I know I have. There
is no point in using HTML, paying for extra bandwidth and designers' work,
if your recipients won't see what they are supposed to see. How to avoid these
problems? First, you have to know that there are two ways to add images to
your HTML message - to link images or to embed them in your e-mail.
Linking images in your e-mails works very similar to how images are displayed
on any website. All you have to do is to add a line to your HTML code that
defines the source of the image to be displayed, something like this:
<img src=http://www.yoursite.com/images/mypic1.gif>
The first thing you have to check is whether your image (mypic1.gif) is
uploaded to your website. Then you have to make sure that the path to
your image is correct. A small mistake (like misspelling) will ruin everything.
Now the important part - even if everything is correct,
your images may still be displayed incorrectly (i.e. not displayed at all).
The first situation when this may happen is if your website is down or overloaded
at the moment when your e-mail is being read. The second,
more typical situation happens when your recipient accesses Internet via dial-up
and uses e-mail client software. When off-line, he or she will
not see the linked images. Some e-mail client software does not display the
linked images even if the user is online.
Embeded Images in an Email
You can fix this if you embed
your images in your e-mail. This means that your e-mail will have these images
attached and the size of the e-mail will increase dramatically (which does
count when you pay for the bandwidth). You will have to alter your HTML code
to add a line that looks like this:
<img src=mypic1.gif>.
If you don't know HTML and don't plan to learn it any time soon, I highly
recommend you just use Outlook Express to create your email. After your finish
just sale the email as an html document.
When you embed (and attach) images to your e-mail, your images will always
"travel" with your e-mail messages, insuring that they will be displayed
correctly. The only exception is when your recipients read your e-mails in
a browser (Web interface to mailbox, like mail.yahoo.com);
they will not see the images, because most Web interfaces can't show embedded
images..
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