A Great Use of Alt Tags In An Email

I was on a plane going through my email the other day and the use of alt tags in emails caught my eye. Why? Because of course images don’t display in my reader when I’m not connected to the Internet, so I got to see a ton of email with images not displayed. Great info for B2B marketers!

If you don’t know what an alt tag is, I talk about them here in a previous post I wrote. They are especially important if your email is made up of one image, or a lot of images. Generally we all never really think about alt tags and usually just input the name of the image when asked to. Admittedly that’s what we do at VR. However I saw some really creative uses of alt tags in emails.

When you choose to add an image to an email using most email service providers, you should be asked to input alternative text or "Alt Tags" like you see below. You might want to get creative and really input an offer on the alt tag instead of just a name of an image.

Even though this Lenovo Thinkpad mailing was pure spam, I think they use alt tags in a great way to those who don’t receive images. The email almost looks like a plain text email.

CB2 also gets creative with alt tags in only parts of their email.

Do you have any great uses of alt tags? We'd love to hear them!

Comments

[RC Rhodes]

You could use humor to convince them to turn on the graphics. Something like:

Pretty please, turn on the graphics, it will not hurt, I promise :}

An email WITHOUT graphics is like a day without sunshine...

A picture is worth a 1000 words, but I will throw in free shipping for those words if you turn on graphics !!

[Helga]

Hi, I have usaly use tags to all my picture´s speacali when Im emailing my newsletter from you guy´s :) (great service by the way) it make people more intresting in downloading the image´s in the emails if they are using like Outlook, well that all I wanted to say, and thanks for this blogg it have brought my to attanchion lot of things that I can do better in markeding my firm.