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Alt Text In Email

Creative use of Alt text in email – Learn more with our Easter campaign!

Marketers are trying to leverage every single opportunity to stand out in the overloaded inbox. To make an impact, more and more email designers rely ...

Marketers are trying to leverage every single opportunity to stand out in the overloaded inbox. To make an impact, more and more email designers rely on enticing images, but like we all know what about recipients who view your emails without downloading the images or email clients that by default turn the images off?  It could hamper your CTR and eventually decrease the opens too!

So, what are the smart ways out? Well, if you are using a lot of image based emails, make sure to utilize reliable HTML attribute – ALT Text (sometime known as “alt tags”)! And, to stand out, your alt text should be equally good as your email campaign.

 

Click to Download Free Easter Template

To share an example, Uplers come up with creative Easter campaign using alt text for our Easter bunny and Easter egg.

With creative utilization of alt text like we did in this campaign, you could easily create highly visual emails and at the same time provide information about the content in the image using alt text.

Here is how our campaign looked like:

Without Alt Text (With Images Turned On)

Easter_02_1

 

Creative use of Alt Text (With Images Off)

Easter campaign

You can see in the table below that webmail clients generally have very good support for ALT text.

Webmail Client Blocks Images by Default Displays ALT Text Styles ALT Text
AOL YES YES YES
Gmail YES YES YES
Yahoo! YES YES YES
Outlook.com Sometimes YES YES

Desktop clients are a bit more reliable since there aren’t as many variables involved:

Desktop Client Blocks Images by Default Displays ALT Text Styles ALT Text
Apple Mail NO YES YES
Lotus Notes YES YES NO
Outlook 2003 YES Sort Of * NO
Outlook 2007 YES Sort Of * NO
Outlook 2010 YES Sort Of * NO
Outlook 2013 YES Sort Of * NO
Thunderbird NO YES YES

Mobile clients have strong support for styled ALT text, which is great news—especially for marketers with heavy Android audiences.

Mobile Client Blocks Images by Default Displays ALT Text Styles ALT Text
Android Email (2.0) YES YES YES
Android Email (4.0) YES YES YES
Blackberry OS 6 YES YES YES
iOS 6 NO YES YES
Windows Phone 7.5 YES NO NO

(Source for client support – https://litmus.com/community/learning/12-alt-text-in-html-email)

P.S – This is limited to desktop emails only and should not be used for responsive emails as slicing images in such small pieces would be not possible. It would not scale in same proportion.

Though for responsive emails, we can hide this and show another image.

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    Kevin George

    Kevin is the Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing full-service email marketing companies. He is an email enthusiast at heart and loves to pen down email marketing content. You can reach him at kevin.g@uplers.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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