Imagine all your pretty pictures replaced with empty boxes…empty except for the accusing little red x in the corner. Sadly this is an all too common scene in the email marketing industry.

Not worried? You should be. The newest retail email rendering study from the Email Experience Council and SubscriberMail is out, and it’s chockfull of numbers that should make email marketers sit up, take notice…and call their designers right away.

Go to http://blog.emailexperience.org/2008/06/retail_email_rendering_benchma.html for the executive summary. We won’t rehash it here, but note this stat:

“Only 42% of the 104 top online retailers included in our study designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% used alt tags adequately or extensively.”

How do you get past this? By no longer thinking of your emails as direct mail or web pages. You don’t have to abandon graphics altogether and stick with text only. But you do have to be more thoughtful in your design. And test. Always test.

If nothing else prompts you to take action and rethink your approach to html email, consider the dollars. The summary states that email generates $48.29 for every dollar spent on it, but that ROI could jump to $52.69 if all emails were optimized for image blocking. That’s $4.40. Per dollar. Not a bad return. And you get much nicer looking emails too.