The above screenshot is from a newsletter that I received today, and it’s pretty normal for me to see broken images in a newsletter, or images that take so long to download, they might as well be broken. We live in a world where there are all sorts of tools and services to monitor the up-time and performance of a Web site, and yet little to no attention gets paid to the up-time and performance of email newsletters. When I get an email about a sale at a big box retail store and the images in the newsletter take 60 seconds to load, that doesn’t make me think very highly of the brand in question. If you have an email newsletter, do yourself a favour and make sure it delivers the kind of experience you want your customers to have.
And in case anyone is wondering, the images were still broken after I gave Outlook permission to download the images…