In a previous post, I spoke about the great design architecture jeweler Blue Nile had implemented with their email creative. Today I received a follow up email for the valentine’s day promotion that had fantastic use of blocked images.
In my post titled: Ugly View for Victoria’s Secret, I commented how the retailer was missing the mark and implementing poor strategy with their email design, given that images are blocked for many subscribers by default. It was a pleasant discovery today with Blue Nile’s email, where with my images blocked I still saw the full promotion and call to action. I didn’t need to enable images to understand what they were offering and how I could take advantage of the offer. They had their primary copy in text (win #1), and they had their image follow up with the same copy as the alternative text (win #2). They even had proper alt-text implemented for their navigation. Pretty much every element of their ‘full image view’ was visible and relatively clean with the default blocked images.
Note though that this is not rocket science. I wouldn’t even categorize this as ‘advanced email marketing strategy’. With that said, many MANY email marketers completely miss the mark here. Not just the newbies or the small shops – but huge global brands. For today though, thumbs up to Blue Nile.
Below is a screen grab of their recent email with the default images blocked.
Below is a screen grab of the full image view of the same email:
