[Sigia-l] Images in HTML newsletters

[Welie, Martijn van]

Thanks everybody for reacting! I am still stuck though...:-(
Let me explain a bit more...see my reactions below..
 
> You probably need to take a step back and rethink the value 
> of the graphics and the metrics in communicating your 
> message.  A plain text or a lightly formatted text-only HTML 
> e-mail message may turn out to be much more effective in 
> communicating your message than one with graphics that comes 
> up as blank on the user's screen.

Well, first of all a plain text version only is simply not an option for our
client.
In this case, our client is a big European car manufacturer and the
newsletter is about a new car model that is being introduced. There are only
2 or 3 images in the newsletter but they are images of the new car!!!!
So, there is absolutely no point is sending a text only version.

> What's more important:  the message, the image, or the 
> metrics/measurements?  Don't let secondary concerns cripple 
> or compromise your primary objective.

If you'd ask my client, she would say 'all of the above' ofcourse. The goal
of the newsletter ultimately is to generate leads for new car sales. So the
newsletter drives people to a site where they can learn more about the car.
But to do that we need to persuade them first and I don't see that work
using words only.

Eric Reiss said that some firewalls/spam filters even managed to filter out
the images out of an email that contains embedded images. I never heard of
that, but if true it would render my solution less effective.

My thinking is as follows. If I don't embedd the images and images are not
automatically loaded, the users won't see the car. The question is then if
people will click on the button to show the images? But then my client is
unhappy because she is communicating very poorly which is unacceptable. So I
am leaning towards embedding the images except for the measurement one.
Measurement is ofcourse less important and not reliable anyway.

Perhaps next time we'll just send them a PDF...;-)

Regards,

Martijn