Is your e-mail campaign coming up empty?

My Outlook e-mail blocks all images, which means I end up with a lot of "Right click here to download images" and "Outlook is protecting your privacy by preventing this automatic download" messages. It also means I receive a lot of otherwise blank e-mails.

It's surprising to me the number of major brands and organizations that continue to send to e-mails made up either entirely of one big image or a series of images with very little alt tags and text. It's a basic e-mail marketing tenet to ensure that 1) your e-mail can be read and 2) it is delivered. A big image means your e-mail might be caught in a spam filter for acting like, well spam, and if you haven't included any text, it's very likely the customer doesn't have time to guess what your e-mail might be about because they have a zillion other e-mails to read, so yours is now headed straight for the delete button.

True, a clever subject line might prevent some of these woes yet just adding a nice mix of HTML text and images will undoubtedly bring better returns.