Using images to spice up your email campaign can be a great idea! Images in email marketing grab a lot of attention. But, embedding images in emails has been a hot topic of debate amongst email marketers. Brands prefer including images to make the emails more visually appealing, but there lies a challenge for the designers and developers as images in emails face rendering issues.
Email marketers prefer minimizing the use of images in emails to increase email deliverability and avoid rendering issues. Even if it?s just a single logo or small image, it makes a great difference to the email as compared to plain text email. There is no single way to include images in emails.
Here are a few options available to embed images in your HTML emails:
Linking Images Directly
The best practice is to upload the images to a directory on your server and then link them to your HTML email using full URL paths. It requires download from the external server and faces issues of getting blocked by most email clients. Make sure the images are not too bulky as large images take time or completely fail to load.
Base64 Encoding
Inline embedding is a simple and faster method to use. You can inline your images into the HTML code by embedding it as a base64 string. Web coding tools such as ImagetoBase64Converter can be used to do the embedding. Once your image is encoded, embed it into your code using a standard HTML image tag.
CID Embedding
Another method that some email developers use is inlining CID (Content-ID) embedded images in the HTML. This works by attaching the image to your email and then using standard reference HTML tags to embed it in the email when the user opens it. The problem with this method is that it shows varying results across email clients.
Figure out what works best for your email campaign, but try to keep fewer images to avoid deliverability and rendering issues. No matter which method you use, never send the image as an email attachment.
To know more about HTML email design and coding, go through Email Marketing Trends and Best Practices.
