I received a promotional email today from sportsshoes.com.

It’s a great example of why lazy email marketing by just using a load of images is a bad idea. Good email marketing uses well formed HTML code, inline styles and descriptive alt tags on images for when those images are not displayed in the recipient’s browser.

This is all important because many webmail sites (like my GMail account shown below) and desktop browsers block images by default.

That means if you’re lazy and just use images in your email marketing, it looks like this:

Even though when you send it, you think it looks like this:

Given the number of clients that use image blocking by default, there’s a good business rationale for coding your marketing emails carefully.