It is certainly no secret to marketers that email clients will not show images by default. You must know how your message looks without your images. Once you have an understanding of how your message looks with images off, you can start to add alternate text behind these images that may engage a reader and cause them to either load images, or click on a link and move into your site.

To see how your email looks without images enabled, just navigate to the Messages Overview page. The Enable/Disable links are at the top of the message preview. The images should be on by default. Your message preview should look like this:

Now click the Disable Images link to see how your message looks with images off.

There are a few items of note concerning the Disable Images feature in Bronto.

1. If you do not indicate image dimensions in your html, the size will not be held once the image has been disabled. This is similar to how most email clients handle images.

2. This is a good reference for email designs that have already been tested using the inbox preview feature that John Gunther described in in his post “See What They See – Using Inbox Previews”. The inbox preview is a very powerful tool that will demonstrate how your email will render in specific email clients.

3. The Disable/Enable link is also available to you when you click the Show Preview button on the Edit Message page.

It is always important to remember that email opens are tracked based on images loading or a link being clicked on. Previewing your message with images off is just one more way Bronto helps put you in the recipient’s seat. Do you have a suggestion that could make this feature more powerful? Please let us know in the comment section below.

Frank Chapman
Bronto Client Services

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What Happens When I Purchase Inbox Previews?

When you purchase Inbox Previews for a given message, you can select between 5 different Preview Sets to display them in. Each of these Preview Sets contains a variety of different email in-boxes that your message will be previewed in. Below is a description of the types of in-boxes that come with the different Preview Sets:

You will need to allow approximately 10 minutes for the previews to be generated. You will be notified via an alert when the inbox previews are ready to view, so why you are waiting, you can navigate to other areas of the application.

Take A Look Around

Once your Inbox Previews have been generated, you can click on each individual Inbox Preview type to see a larger view of what the message will look like in that specific inbox.

Inbox Previews allow you to take the guess work out of designing your messages and can be a massive time saver. Got a suggestion for Inbox Previews? Let us know in the comments section below!

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
Editor of Brontoversity

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