Alt Tags in emails are no longer optional
Aug 22 2008
TeNo, a manufacturer of some really nice men’s and women’s jewelry, sends image-heavy emails that are great for showcasing their product but in this day and age of image blocking, it can be…unreliable. This email I received from them last week is a prime example of why you use Alt Tags. The entire preview pane is blank. They did not even chop up the image into multiple smaller images to help in load time, so I sat and waited for about 5-10 seconds for the image to download (on a T1). When the average time an email is looked at is just under 3 seconds, this is totally unacceptable.
I have seen some very creative ways that Alt Tags have been used, for example, “By blocking this image you can’t see you are going to save 30%.”
The Alt Text is prime real estate these days. For those marketers out there not using Alt Text, it is time to start reevaluating your image-only emails. With the prevelance of image blocking this is more important than your text-only version.
Published in Ecommerce, Email Design, Getting Better at Email Marketing, Missed Opportunites on Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Tags: alt tags, Ecommerce, image blocking, TeNo, trends








