Text-to-Image Ratio for Inbox Placement

4 in 10 people will view an email with images off. Yesterday, my team and I were discussing an email creative we’d built for HelloFresh. Aesthetically, it was beautiful - full of colour, engaging photography, and a bold hero banner. But with images off? You couldn’t see the offer. You wouldn’t even know you needed a voucher code. One of my team said, “Does it really matter? Images always show.” Well… not exactly. In a B2C environment, yes - images are more likely to show, thanks to mobile clients like Gmail and Apple Mail preloading them. But it’s still estimated that 43% of Gmail users have images defaulted off. And in B2B, it’s a different world. Outlook, still the workhorse of many corporate inboxes, blocks images by default. That means your beautiful offer might look like a grey box and some broken icons. So what can you do? - Never send image-only emails. Use live HTML text for your key message and CTA. - Use bulletproof buttons so your “Buy now” or “Sign up” still works without an image. - Write meaningful ALT text, it should make sense if read in place of the image. - Keep a healthy text-to-image ratio (around 60:40) to help both deliverability and comprehension. - Put your value proposition above the fold in live text, this is what prompts people to hit “download images.” - Always QA your email in major clients with images off before hitting send. Want to test, check the ctrs or unsubscribes rates of emails, which were not optimised for images being off. If you wouldn’t post a social ad without checking the image displays correctly, why waste the opportunity in email? Your creative needs to work with and without images , because those 4 in 10 people might be the very ones you’re trying to convert. P.S FARM Rio when images sell your product...

PSA: If you are sending images as email (or your agency is) it’s potentially hurting your deliverability... Let me explain. Back in the 2000s, image-heavy emails were a clever trick to avoid spam filters. (Viagra ads, Weight loss pills etc) In 2025? They're actively hurting your email deliverability Here's what's happening behind the scenes: (At the inbox provider (ISP) level) Gmail, Yahoo, and others now use sophisticated AI to READ your emails and determine if they're legitimate or spam at the content level. AND with the recent release of Apple IOS 18.3 - Reads only text in the HTML to generate a "recap" for iPhone readers.. (Does not read ALT) When you send an all-image email: - The AI struggles to understand your content - The AI check images over-utilized images With limited text to analyze and general images to check- they rely heavily on engagement history. If that domain is poor or borderline poor due to lack of hygiene or good segmentation, there is a chance you're headed to spam! Beyond Deliverability Issues: Image-heavy emails also... - Provide zero click context (where exactly did they click?) - Break completely when images don't load on slow connections (terrible experience) - Create major accessibility issues for visually impaired subscribers (ADA Compliance) - Make content unsearchable in subscriber inboxes (how do they find you?) - Can get clipped due to HTML size limitations (50kb for mobile) Think about the math: If your open rate is 20%, what if better deliverability bumped it to 24%? That's 20% more opens → more clicks → more revenue. My Rule of Thumb: 40% Text / 60% Images Try this: Text-Image Balance - Create emails with at least 40% real HTML text (not text embedded in images) - Use web-safe fonts that render properly across all devices - Build HTML buttons instead of image-based CTAs - Use GOOD segments (batch and blast bad!) Small adjustment, huge impact on your deliverability, engagement, and most importantly—revenue. So stop copying figma files images straight to your email, use the areas you can replicate in HTML as real HTML. Test this against your current templates and watch what happens. If you're doing GREAT segmentation - this may have minor effect, but let's face it, most marketers are using "90 day engaged all" windows for their segments aka modern day batch and blast... so every little bit helps. P.S. if you enjoyed this and thought it was insightful, Chase Dimond and I are speaking at RETENTION Virtual summit on March 13th - I'll throw a url in the comments so if you want a seat, you can grab it for free.

Your email designs could be tanking your deliverability And you might not even realize it They can have bad image-to-text ratios, which can: - Confuse email clients trying to render them - Be unreadable on screen readers - Get flagged by spam filters This messes with your deliverability rates Plus, it trashes your sender reputation Don’t let your design throw your email marketing off track Make sure you: - Use >500 characters of text to dodge spam filters - Balance text & images (60/40 mix works best) - Compress images to cut down load times - Break up big image blocks with live text - Add alt text for every image Keep your email designs looking sharp But not at the cost of deliverability Get the balance right, and your emails will hit inboxes & boost your rev/sales

We’ve worked with hundreds of Shopify brands on their emails and this is one mistake we see time and time again…. A lot of DTC brands are still sending image-only emails. Looks cool, but hurts performance. Here’s why you need to balance text + images in your emails (and what happens if you don’t): 1) Image-only emails tank your deliverability Gmail and Outlook flag image-heavy emails as promo or spam. If your emails aren’t getting opened, it’s probably not your subject line—it’s your structure. 2) They take forever to load You’ve got 3 seconds before someone bounces. If your giant image doesn't load (or your customer is on bad Wi-Fi), they’re gone. Meanwhile text loads instantly. 3) No text = no context If someone can’t see the image, they miss the entire message. Including real text ensures your CTA, offer, and product details still get across. 4) You’re killing your mobile experience Image-only emails break on mobile all the time, text gets too small to read. Responsive text and buttons help create a frictionless experience—especially for people scrolling with one hand. 5) Emails need to sell, not just look pretty Beautiful design matters. But conversion matters more. A clean mix of images + copy consistently outperforms pretty, image-only emails in every campaign we run. Luckily once there’s a balance of image and text in emails, it boosts deliverability, open rates, clicks, and revenue across the board. Curious to hear from other brands—how are you structuring your emails right now? Let me know in the comments. PS. This image is me pleading to the GMail gods to let these emails get delivered lol.