Working with images in an email message is always a bit of a gamble. Especially if you want to wrap your entire message into one or several images. A lot of email clients don’t show the images by default. But there is a way to get that limitation out of the way.
We recently got this great example from Moo.com in our inbox. We already talked about the email marketers behind this webshop and their clever way of doing email marketing in our blog articles. And this is one email that we certainly wouldn’t want to keep from you. They would like to graphically promote the sale period. But at the same time they do realize that you jeopardize the success of your email with one image. A red cross in an otherwise blank screen doesn’t tell you much.
Columns
So they decided to use the alt tag in a very creative way. They didn’t use it to just explain an image, but to get a clear message across. they cut their image in six pieces and placed them in a table with the same amount of columns. The left the outer columns alone, besides a simple background color. The other columns got an alt tag for the image that was in them.
Alt-tag
This tag only contained one letter. When you read across the table, column 2 up to 5 spelled the word ‘sale’. And they also put a white font color and a 230 px font size in the code of the cells. When the images were turned off, the alt text displayed a clear message. In times of need, HTML can be your best friend.
