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Marketers who send e-mails using “click here” buttons instead of text for opt-out links risk breaking federal law, said e-mail expert Jay Schwedelson during a presentation at the Direct Marketing Days New York Conference last week.

The federal Can Spam Act requires marketing e-mails to include an opt-out mechanism and a return address.

However, images are blocked by default in 59% of consumer e-mail and 69% of work e-mail. As a result, if the opt-out link is presented as a graphic, it won’t appear to many users.

“When an image comes up broken and [as a result] there’s no ability for someone to remove themselves, and there’s no physical address of the sender, the marketer is no longer in compliance with Can Spam,” said Schwedelson, corporate vice president for list firm Worldata.

Coincidentally, Magilla Marketing recently learned of a consumer who reported a marketer to the authorities over just such a mistake.

When New York City resident Kimberly Wadsworth began receiving e-mail from a marketing communications firm whose opt-out link was graphics-based, she couldn’t figure out how to remove herself from the company’s list because her home computer has trouble processing images.

“My computer is seven years old and on dial up, so I know I’m rare but I’m not alone,” she said. Wadsworth said she tried opting out through other channels, such as the company’s contact form, but was unsuccessful.

After several failed attempts to get the company to remove her from its mailings, Wadsworth said: “I got mad enough to report them to the attorney general’s office.”

But once she sent an e-mail to the company explaining she had contacted the New York attorney general’s office, the company promptly responded and removed her from its list. Wadsworth added she hasn’t received e-mail from the company since.

However, this whole fiasco could have been avoided with a simple design change.

“If you have a graphics-based link strategy, you’re failing because your graphics are going to be blocked and no one will know what to click on,” said Schwedelson.

Ideally, commercial e-mail should be created as a hybrid of text and graphics so when the graphics are shut off, recipients can still understand the e-mail, Schwedelson said.

Moreover, hybrid e-mails outpull all-html e-mails by two to one, he added.