Beefree blog

Why You Should Avoid Sending Image-Only Emails

Beefree team
Beefree team
Oct 20, 2015
Why You Should Avoid Sending Image-Only Emails
Why You Should Avoid Sending Image-Only Emails

Originally published on October 20, 2015. Last updated August 27, 2021.An image-only email might seem like a good idea, until you preview the email and come across this error.

images-not-displayed-image

As an email marketer or designer, the dreaded, “Images are not displayed,” error might make you wince. But this is what subscribers could come across when greeted with an image-only email.While incorporating images in email can better draw your subscribers’ attention and create more interest, these emails are not always going to show up in the ways you expect them to.Want to avoid the pitfalls of image-only emails? Here are some tips on how to better optimize your campaigns.

6 reasons why you should avoid sending image-only emails

Create image-only emails risks encountering a number of inbox, mobile rendering and other optimization challenges including:

1) Email image display settings being turned off

In the past, many email subscribers wouldn’t see or take the time to download the images in their email. This was due to email service providers blocking images by default and subscribers also having the option to personalize their email image settings:

display-settings

Email service providers did this to protect their subscribers from spammers who would usually send image-only emails. This was common practice. As a result, back in 2013, about 43% of Gmail subscribers viewed their emails with images turned off.Nowadays, many email service providers, like Gmail and Apple, load images by default but still provide the option to block images. The “Ask before displaying external images,” setting also interferes with rendering. When users have this display setting turned on your image-only emails will look like this blank, empty email until they choose to turn on “always display images,” from your sending address:

image-blocking

For privacy and security reasons, many subscribers may also block images due to tracking pixels, which are embedded inside email images and used to gather marketing data.As an email marketer, it’s crucial to think about the possibility of images being turned off when designing your email to keep them from being blocked, broken or inaccessible.Remind your email list to turn their display image settings on (or at least add you to the list of trusted sources) so they can receive the full customer experience.

2) Difficulty downloading images 

Sometimes emails take a long time to download, and all that subscribers see is a message near the bottom of their screen that reads, “Download remaining XX bytes.”Typically, this occurs when your readers have reached a maximum download size limit. Depending on a subscriber’s connection speed and data plan, it’s not wise for them to download images that are too big, especially if they are on their phone and the image is not optimized for mobile.When downloading friction occurs, your subscribers will likely delete your email rather than waiting for it to load. If your email isn’t optimized and images take too long to download, add more text to balance the email out. Be sure to test your emails to find the right balance of text and images.

3) Emails marked as spam 

Image-only emails often get flagged as spam. Spammers have mastered concealing their text inside of these emails. And since about 45% of all emails sent hit the spam box, it's best to learn best practices on how to stay out of there.If you fill your email from top to bottom with images, chances are that spam filters will catch your email before your subscribers ever get a chance to see it. Optimize your emails with a healthy mix of text and images to ensure that your emails reach your subscribers.

4) Not optimized for mobile 

With 42.3% of people deleting emails when they're not optimized for mobile, it’s best to avoid using only images in your email campaigns. Image elements are fixed, making it difficult for image-only emails to render properly. Creating this type of email risks blurry images, a loss of readable text, and a lack of functional links and CTAs.A mobile-friendly email consists of both text and images. This ensures that subscribers understand the gist of your email, images or not, and no matter the device they are viewing from. Optimizing for mobile devicesisn’t a choice anymore, but a necessity. Designing in mobile design mode ensures that your email looks the way you intend it to on both desktop and mobile.

5) Lack of accessibility

Not including live text in your emails leads to accessibility problems. Screen readers often can’t decipher the content of an image, and rely on alt text to explain what the image is about. Avoid putting CTAs and other text inside your email images. Screen readers won’t pick up on these elements, which means this is not the best way to reach all of your subscribers.This also goes for individuals who need to translate their email messages to a different language. The translator can’t pick up on text inside of images. Again, another reason to include a balance of live text and images so your emails are accessible to all subscribers.

6) Lack of searchability

Sometimes users want to go back through their inbox to find an email containing a coupon, special offer or other specific information. Image-only emails rule out the possibility of finding this email because there are no text or keywords to pick up on when searching their inbox. Even trying to copy and paste certain parts of your email text is impossible since your text is solely inside your images.

How to improve an image-heavy email

Just because image-only emails should be avoided, does not mean you can’t include images in your emails. Optimizing images correctly are key to a high-converting campaign. Let’s look at a few email design best practices for image-heavy emails:

  • Find a text to image ratio that works for you. Have enough text in your emails so your subscribers can understand your message with images turned on or off. 
  • Design for mobile. With mobile email now accounting for at least 50% of opens, marketers can no longer gamble with a design that isn’t optimized for mobile devices. Take control over how your email appears on smaller devices and make your emails fully mobile-responsive
  • Create bulletproof buttons. Use HTML rather than an image to ensure your CTA buttons are clear, clickable and render correctly on all devices.  
  • Use ALT text. Include alternative text for all images in your emails. These need to be clear so subscribers can understand your message.

Design beautiful emails in BEE Pro

Image-only emails are visually appealing, but they aren’t the safest design choice if you’re looking to create perfectly responsive emails. It’s best to find a balance between live text and images. BEE provides you with the tools you need to optimize your design process to create perfectly balanced emails. Start creating in the design suite now with a free trial.

Related posts

How Beefree is Helping Email Makers Scale Their Production

2024 was a banner year for email markers everywhere. From sleek newsletters to interactive promos, you flexed your creative muscle to new heights and did it with a level of speed and efficiency that made crafting award-worthy emails look easy. Let’s dive into the numbers, trends, and stories that made this year unforgettable for email makers like you. 
Beefree team
Jan 6, 2025

Design Award-Winning Emails with Beefree

A few weeks back, we kicked off the first-ever 2024 Really Good Email Awards (cue the confetti). Today, we’re taking it one step further and sharing how you can build award-winning emails in Beefree.
Emily Santos
Dec 26, 2024

Simplifying Email Creation for Universities with Beefree

In a recent conversation with Rice University’s Owl Business Analyst, Sonja Fulbright, we revealed all the challenges that led the university to lean on Beefree—not only to bring their decentralized teams together in one platform but also to increase the speed and quality of the university’s emails. 
Stephanie Benoit
Jan 2, 2025

How Beefree is Helping Email Makers Scale Their Production

2024 was a banner year for email markers everywhere. From sleek newsletters to interactive promos, you flexed your creative muscle to new heights and did it with a level of speed and efficiency that made crafting award-worthy emails look easy. Let’s dive into the numbers, trends, and stories that made this year unforgettable for email makers like you. 
Beefree team
Beefree team
6 Jan
2025

2024 was a banner year for email markers everywhere. From sleek newsletters to interactive promos, you flexed your creative muscle to new heights and did it with a level of speed and efficiency that made crafting award-worthy emails look easy. 

At Beefree, we’ve had a front-row seat to all the incredible ways you scaled your email production. With templates that sped up creation and workflows that brought your team closer, you’ve redefined what it means to create emails that inspire and deliver.

Let’s dive into the numbers, trends, and stories that made this year unforgettable for email makers like you. 

Total number of emails created: 1,648,180

That’s right—over 1.6 million emails were crafted using Beefree this year, each one a testament to your creativity and efficiency. Everyone from small startups to large enterprises, and teams across the globe harnessed the power of Beefree.

The templates that powered your success

Out of the 1.6 million emails created this year, 178,199 started with a little help from our template catalog.

Our most loved categories included:

  • Templates for Gmail & Mailchimp: Whether you were crafting a campaign or a one-off blast, these platform agnostic templates made it easy to integrate design and delivery effortlessly.
  • Password-reset emails: You proved that even the most utilitarian messages deserve to be noticed.
  • Notification email templates: From order confirmations to system alerts, these templates kept your communications clear, concise, and on-brand.

These favorites highlight a vital truth: even the simplest communications can leave a lasting impression. Templates have become your secret weapon, allowing you to hit the ground running, save time, and focus on the creative flair that makes your emails stand out.

(source)

Total time saved per week: 2 hours

Time is money, and in 2024, Beefree users saved big. On average, 59% of users shaved off at least 2 hours per week on email creation, giving them more time to focus on strategy, creativity, and all the other things that make their emails shine. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

An impressive 81% of users reported being able to design emails at least 3x faster since implementing Beefree. What used to take hours now takes mere minutes with pre-designed templates and built-in collaboration tools. 

(source)

More time saved = more time to design

By cutting down on the nitty-gritty of email production, like formatting, coding, and repetitive edits, Beefree gave you the freedom to focus on what truly matters: design. 

With more time on your hands, you experimented with bold new layouts, fine-tuned your visual storytelling, and perfected those interactive elements that kept your audience engaged.

(source)

84% of Beefree users saw an increase in design quality after implementing our tool and 84% have increased on-brand email creation by 50% or more. 

Think about it: The less time on production meant more time to think creatively and innovate.

New height reached 

With more time on your hands and even more accessible design solutions, 2024 became the year you pushed boundaries and achieved more than ever before. And as your email production scaled, so did your ambitions. 

This surge in productivity and creativity signaled that you were ready for the next step—a plan that could grow alongside you and offer even more tailored support for your evolving needs. Recognizing this, we launched our Business Plan in May, designed specifically to meet you where you’re at. 

This plan was crafted to offer the advanced features and scalability that busy teams need, like enhanced collaboration tools and more customization options. 

Is the Beefree HTML Email Builder Right for You? >

After upgrading to a paid plan, 41% of Beefree users saw an ROI in just under a month! 58% report that Beefree has been a KEY part of scaling their email programs. 

(source)

Beautiful design matters 

A well-crafted email design does more than look good; it communicates your brand’s personality, values, and message in a way that’s instantly recognizable and engaging. It draws the reader in, guides their eyes through the content seamlessly, and encourages action, whether it’s clicking through to a website, signing up for an event, or making a purchase.

In 2024, you embraced the power of beautiful design like never before, and you were rewarded for it. Beefree users increased their CTR by an average of 25%.

The marketing ROI on the one email alone was immeasurable. Open rates increased by over 20%, engagement rates by 31%, and best of all, the subscribers fell under a healthy .1%. All are driven by the creative firepower of Beefree. 

Aimee Meester
, Founder and CEO, Madison Taylor Marketing 
Read the case study

In a digital landscape where first impressions are everything, beautiful design isn’t just nice to have—it’s a necessity. And with Beefree, creating visually appealing emails has never been easier, empowering you to continue delivering designs that captivate and convert.

We can’t wait to see what you create next.

Design Award-Winning Emails with Beefree

A few weeks back, we kicked off the first-ever 2024 Really Good Email Awards (cue the confetti). Today, we’re taking it one step further and sharing how you can build award-winning emails in Beefree.
Emily Santos
Emily Santos
26 Dec
2024

A few weeks back, we kicked off the first-ever 2024 Really Good Email Awards (cue the confetti). The “award show” was paired with downloadable resources sharing the ins and outs of what made these emails winners. Today, we’re taking it one step further and sharing how you can build award-winning emails in Beefree.  

But first, what is an award-winning email? 

Winning emails like Miro’s welcome series and the AllTrails x Calm collab didn’t just meet expectations—they redefined them. Besides being the most loved by the RGE community, the winning emails beautifully balanced creativity, trends, and best practices. They gave us insight into the future of email design and how to break the rules intentionally. 

While each email was different in its own unique way, we noticed a consistent pattern in them all: On-brand, but never boring. Let’s take the emails by Sundays as a really good example of staying on brand. Everything from their Black Friday emails to their order confirmation emails follows the same brand guidelines, ensuring a cohesive experience at every touchpoint. 

Resource from our Award Ceremony

This realization was validating! As marketers, we know how important presenting a cohesive experience is for brand recognition, awareness, and loyalty. But as passionate designers, we're always looking at the next cool design trend. This pattern of "on-brand, yet never boring" pushes us to explore new and creative ways to showcase our branding and spread our message.

Designing on-brand, never-boring emails with Beefree

Beefree makes balancing creativity with your brand guidelines seamless. Its combination of brand management, productivity solutions, and a no-code drag-and-drop editor enables everyone to create beautiful designs that inspire people to action and drive results. 

uevi.co/4075ZNTX

Step 1: Set your brand guidelines

Your brand, your rules. Lock in colors, fonts, and logos so your emails look like you —even if Greg from accounting gets a little too creative with the copy. 

There are several ways to set your brand guidelines in Beefree, but our favorite is to use our “Get Brand Styles” feature, which can be accessed in your workspace’s style settings.


Once you’re in your settings, click on “Get brand styles” and input your website’s URL. From there, Beefree will retrieve your brand’s colors, fonts, and social links. You can learn more about this feature here

Once you import your brand’s essentials, you can continue to add brand elements. You can get as granular as you’d like. From a predefined width for emails and pages, to the appearance of your CTAs. 

With our Advanced Style Kit, you can even set predefined background colors, set the appearance of lists, and tables. 

Once you add your style settings, every email your team creates with Beefree will have the same brand colors, icons, links, fonts, and whatever else you decide to assign. Now, let’s say you want to take things one step further. 

Step 2: Create re-usable content blocks 

Beverage brand and winner of our Endless Cheer Award, “Athletic Brewing,” is a great example that following a template doesn’t have to be restrictive. 

All of their holiday templates follow a similar layout: A hero section with a standout image, a large title, body text, and a CTA followed by a similar content block below. 

Resource from our Award Ceremony


Beefree’s Saved and Synced Rows are an easy way to build out templated layouts for your emails. Most users turn frequently used content blocks, such as headers or footers, into Saved Rows so they can easily use them in other designs. You can also save rows as “Synced” when you want to apply any changes made to a row to all of your other email templates. 

You can find all of your Saved and Synced Rows in the builder's Rows tab by selecting “My Saved Rows.”

Templates and re-usable content blocks aren’t just made to help you speed up creation time; they’re about allowing you and your team more time to be creative. The less time you spend worrying about what layout to create, the more time you can spend coming up with clever messaging or taking high-quality product shots. 

uevi.co/1491YKUH

Let’s get to the fun stuff.

Step 3: Bring your visions to life 

In our downloadable resource, we shared the characteristics of each email that made it stand out. We highlighted key elements such as persuasive copy, value-driven content, actionable CTA’s, interesting layouts, and so much more. 

We could spend hours sharing tips and tricks to emulate the award-winning characteristics of an email, but for now, we’ll share some of Beefree’s features that can help take your emails from “meh” to “Why didn’t I think of that?” 

Display conditions

Why settle for one-size-fits-all when you can design emails that feel like a direct DM to each recipient? Beefree’s Display Conditions feature allows you to pick a condition (or write one from scratch if you are technically savvy), apply it to a row, and thus show different content based on the recipient. 

We can see a great example of how Display Conditions could be used in Rael’s award-winning email below: 

Really Good Email Awards Deck

The “Hook, Line, and Sinker” Awards goes to Rael for its charming abandoned cart email that feels like a warm reminder rather than a hard sell.  Instead of just pushing one product, the thoughtfully curated product suggestions make it easy to explore complementary items. 

uevi.co/7663GXCO

Interactivity

Throughout all winning emails, we saw brands bring their message to life with movement. Whether they used videos, gifs, icons, or crafted visually interesting layouts – making their emails interactive was crucial in getting our attention. 

Resource from our Award Ceremony

With Beefree, you can turn your designs into playgrounds. Easily add videos, GIFs, countdown timers, surveys, hover effects, and more. To see what’s possible, we recommend browsing through our template catalog! 

Mobile design mode 

Part of crafting a truly on-brand experience is ensuring that your brand looks good anywhere. Beefree takes responsiveness and dynamic design to the next level by allowing you to create custom mobile experiences. With Mode Design Mode you can re-arrange, re-size, and remove elements for smaller screens. 

uevi.co/2498UJQM 

Step 4: Let AI take care of the little things 

Creating award-winning emails takes vision, creativity, and time. But let’s be honest—sometimes, the little tasks, like tweaking ALT text or sourcing the perfect image, can slow you down.

With Beefree’s AI-powered solutions, you can let your eager intern handle the busy work while you focus on making your emails unforgettable.

AI Image Generator

Struggling to find the perfect image? Beefree’s AI Image Generator lets you create custom visuals that enhance your email’s message. Just add an image block to your email and in the Content Properties panel on the right, click “Create with AI,” then fill out the details. For additional prompt suggestions visit this support page

Alt Text Generator

For us, alt text isn’t just a best practice—it’s essential for creating accessible emails. But crafting the perfect descriptions for every image can feel like a chore.

 Beefree’s AI ALT Text Generator takes care of it for you, automatically generating accurate and descriptive ALT text for your images, gifs, icons, and stickers. 

AI Copy Assistant 

When Greg from accounting gets a bit of writer’s block or when you need a little help writing a catchy CTA, AI is here to help generate bold and fresh ideas. 

Ready to start designing? 

A really good email involves a balance of best practices and bold moves. The winning emails didn’t just make an impact; they set the standard for what’s possible in email marketing. Now, it’s your turn to take the lessons, insights, and inspiration from these campaigns and channel them into your next great idea. Start designing with Beefree for free!

If you’re looking for even more inspiration or tactical takeaways, don’t forget to download the deck or watch the Award ceremony replay! 

Stay informed on all email trends

From the latest creative design strategies that inspire your next campaign to industry best practices and tech advancements, our newsletter is the go-to for all things creation.

By clicking Subscribe you're agreeing with our Privacy Policy