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Images ON in Gmail – If You’re Authenticating

July 23rd, 2009 | by Ben

images-turned-offUnless you’re totally new to email marketing, you know that most email programs turn images in your HTML emails OFF by default. It’s meant to protect your privacy, but is very annoying to legit email marketers for a variety of reasons. Well, Gmail to the rescue.

Matt Vernhout from EmailKarma reports that Gmail is now turning images ON by default, so long as the recpient has sent YOU, the sender, two messages in the past (kind of a neat way to make sure there’s a trusted relationship). Here’s the post from the official Gmail Blog.

There’s another catch — your emails to the recipient have to be authenticated (SPF or DKIM). As a reminder,  Authentication is a method used by many ISPs to judge whether or not an email is trustworthy (learn more at the Online Trust Alliance’s website). All major forms of authentication are built-in and automatically turned on for all your MailChimp campaigns.

As Matt points out, it’s almost worth it to get rid of any “DO-NOT-REPLY” statements you might be using, and actually encourage your recipients to send you emails. If it sounds a little too scary to add a “send us feedback!” link for your entire list, just add that for Gmail subscribers.

Here’s how you can segment your list and send only to your subscribers @gmail.

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9 Comments

    • Mike Hillyer says:

      Generally speaking wouldn’t you agree that avoiding a do-not-reply is a good way to better engage subscribers in any case?

      While it can lead to an increase in incoming mail, I’d say it better engages people and could potentially lead to fewer complaints because people can reply and reach a person rather than clicking a complaint button.

      • Ben says:

        Hi Mike,
        Agreed. Those “do-not-reply” emails are a huge wasted opportunity to engage with customers. And it’s not even like you have to reply all that instantly when someone replies to you (but it’s nice). Whenever I send a newsletter, I get hundreds of bounces and replies immediately after. That can seem overwhelming, but it’s not so bad. My inbox filters throw them all into a folder, and after a day goes by (enough time for most subscribers to reply or bounce), I’ll spend about an hour of my time sifting through them and replying back to people. It’s fun. I get a kick out of hearing from customers, and I think people get a kick out of receiving replies “from an actual human.”

        Granted, my lists are not in the millions (yet). And the real pain is not replying to humans, but handling the “my email address is changed to…” autoreplies.

        For those with lists way too large to handle replies in-house, there are companies that’ll do this for you like:
        http://www.bamboocricket.com/email/

        • Josh Hutchinson says:

          I get a kick out of reading the ‘out of office’ replies.

          Details of the vacation are always nice– we got one yesterday that was essentially ‘I’m not going to read your email because I’m sitting on a deck chair in the south of France, and currently wine is more important to me than whatever you have to say’.

          Nice.

          • Ben says:

            Ha! They actually put some time and consideration into their autoreply. That’s rare. Think you might send them some wine whenever they get back?

          • Peter Hogenkamp says:

            Hehe. Actually when I get replies from people working for the same company who are away for the same period of time, I sometimes start guessing whether they might be on vacation together…

    • Sandi Solow says:

      Do you think this will affect open rates at all?

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