Despite Outlook.com and Yahoo Mail recently moving to enable images by default, there are still many email clients that block images by default. Upwards of one-third of your emails are likely opened with images disabled. That makes “defensive design” techniques like HTML text and alt text a must.

I have a three-pronged philosophy when it comes to defensive design:

1. Basic, low-effort defensive design should be status quo. That means baking a fair amount of HTML text and alt text into your email template, using preheader text, using HTML text and alt text in your primary and secondary messaging.

This Orbitz email is a great example of using HTML text and this B&H email uses a strong mix of HTML text and alt text. The B&H example is particularly telling since on the day that I took that screenshot, they were having image server problems or something so that none of the images loaded despite them being whitelisted. A similar issue affected a recent Urban Outfitters email, such that only some of the images loaded. It revealed that they don’t use any HTML text outside of their preheader and footer and that the alt text for their primary message block was “graphic1,” which is placeholder text they’ve used in the past.

2. More attention to defensive design is warranted for transactional emails, welcome emails, win-back emails, and re-permission emails. Since these are emails that are more likely to be viewed with images blocked, more HTML text in particular should be used.

3. Consider periodically designing more heavily for blocked images. Just like you spend more time on the image-on appearance of some emails, it’s worth spending more time on defensive design on occasion as well. More advanced techniques like using background colors for images or creating mosaics by color blocking table cells come into play here.

This Bendon Lingerie email is a great example of a simple and powerful mosaic paired with succinct alt text. And this Mothercare email uses a mosaic, background colors on images, and extensive styled alt text to create an images-off experience that rivals the images-on experience.

Future Prediction:
Considering that spam is well under control and that mobile bandwidth is becoming more plentiful, I predict that image blocking will gradually go away in the years ahead. By 2018, I think defensive design will be unnecessary. But while we wait for the future to get here, these techniques will continue to be effective and well worth marketers’ time.

While responsive design is getting all the buzz, there are many gradations of email design between the old desktop-centric designs and full-fledged responsive designs. For marketers with smaller budgets or ones looking to take gradual steps toward being mobile-friendly, there are options.

Many brands have taken the first step and adopted what I call a quasi-mobile aware email design, which uses a single-column design with larger images, larger fonts, and larger buttons for the primary and secondary content blocks, but keeps the desktop-centric header, navigation bar, administrative links and footer. Over the past year or so, JCPenney has used both desktop-centric and quasi-mobile aware designs. But last month they took the next step up the ladder to a wholehearted mobile aware email design.

As you can see in the graphic below, the shift to fully mobile aware entailed…

1. Narrowing the width of their emails to 665 pixels from 710
2. Making their logo 4-times larger
3. Reducing their number of navigation bar links to 10 from 12, making the remaining ones larger, and using a two-row nav bar
4. Increasing the size of their content blocks, their fonts, and call-to-actions—with the main CTA for each content block now being a button
5. Making their gift services footer for Father’s Day much larger than the one used to promote Mother’s Day
6. Drastically increasing the size of their social media links, as well as their “store locator” and “customer service” links

All of those changes make for emails that are roughly twice as long as before, but way more mobile-friendly, especially on smartphones.

This is a smart transition to being mobile-aware. What’s also smart is how they haven’t stopped experimenting and tweaking their design. A May 29 email used both a different navigation bar design and gift services footer. The mobile behavior of consumers continues to evolve, so ongoing testing is critical.

A swipe file is a record of your top-performing campaigns that you return to for learnings and ideas. It was this concept that inspired us to create the Email Swipe File on Pinterest, where we share the emails and landing pages that excite and impress us. We’ve already shared nearly 150 examples of email awesomeness dating all the way back to 2006—and there’s much more to come.

In The Best of the Email Swipe File, we highlight the 20 examples from the past year that we love most and put them in the context of five trends that are having a major impact on email design:

• Mobile-Friendly: The shift from wide screens and mice to narrow screens and fat fingers
• Personalization: A key tactic for making messages more personally relevant
• Triggered Sophistication: Longer campaigns, smarter content and better triggers
• Editorial Voice: The influence of content marketing’ success
• Inspired Fundamentals: The tactics that have been effective for years and years

Learn more about these trends, see which emails and landing pages we loved best, and check out the ideas we most hope you’ll steal, test and make your own. Get inspired!

>> Download The Best of the Email Swipe File