More Bad News for Your HTML E-mail

The folks at Goodmail have come out with a study concerning e-mail graphics that indicates the situation is even more dire than most think.

In a recent survey that drew 226 respondents, 58.5% said that when they receive e-mails with blocked images or links, they delete them, and 19.8% ignore them.

The news comes as e-mail inbox providers are increasingly blocking graphics in an attempt to protect users against computer viruses.

According to a recent survey by e-mail service provider Epsilon Interactive, almost two thirds of e-mail users have received e-mail with images turned off.

As a result, Michael Della Penna, the vice president of marketing for Epsilon, predicted in an article here two weeks ago that marketers who use HTML based e-mail are going to see their marketing efforts slaughtered in the fourth quarter holiday shopping season if they don’t take steps to minimize the effects of blocked graphics.

Goodmails results would seem to underscore Della Penna’s assessment.

In other findings, Goodmail’s survey found that 84.1% of respondents said they would like their e-mail box providers to mark messages that they have confirmed are actually from the purported senders.

Also, e-mail deliverability remains a problem. Two thirds of respondents said they sometimes do not get e-mails they expected, according to Goodmail. About half of those who said they sometimes don’t get anticipated e-mails said they never find them; half said they find them in their junk mail folders.

About a third of the respondents overall said they get all their e-mail.

David Atlas, the vice president of marketing for Goodmail Systems, said many marketers have their heads in the sand over e-mail deliverability and graphics problems.

“This research is showing that whatever you may think you’re sending, not only is it not getting into the inbox, even if it is getting into the inbox, it doesn’t look like what you’re sending,” he said. “They’re getting a big red ‘x’ with warning message saying ‘images have been suppressed for your protection.’ That’s not a positive brand experience.”

Of course, one of Atlas’s prescriptions to overcome e-mail’s graphics challenges is for marketers to buy Goodmail’s Certified Email service, under which marketers can pay to have their e-mail guaranteed delivered to AOL addresses with graphics and links intact.

“You can quote me as the vice president of self-serving research if you want,” he said.

Currently, Certified Email is available only for AOL addresses. Yahoo! has also said it will implement Goodmail’s system, but for transactional messages only, and it has yet to publish a date when Certified Email will be available for Yahoo’s e-mail addresses.

Atlas said he also didn’t know when Yahoo will implement Goodmail’s scheme.