It’s sometimes a nightmare for e-marketers: images that aren’t displayed as default in some email clients. Outlook is a stickler there and Google followed the same slope with Gmail. Safety was the favourite argument.
But from now all all of this changes in Gmail. Gmail now handles images in a completely different way. The result is that images will now be immediately visible in this email client on a desktop computer or in iOs or Android. In order to this, Google has adopted a new method. From now on the images will not directly be displayed from the server of the sending email marketing platform. No, first the images will be redirected to a proxy server from Google and will then be shown to the reader of the email message.
Benefits
According to Google this approach will improve safety. All images are checked for known viruses and malware. Furthermore it will benefit the reader. He never again has to press that dreadful “show images” button. And it’s also a blessing for the email marketer. You can know be sure that when you build your message, your images will support the message immediately – for Gmail readers at least. An additional argument to segment? Google is rolling out this update now and hopes to be ready in spring 2014 for the iDevices.
Panic
For a moment there was some panic amongst e-marketers. The open ratio is measured by a mini-image in the email. What if Google’s proxy server prevents that? Especially when Google further applies the principle to save the image only once and send it to all recipients on their platform? According to a spokesperson of Google this shouldn’t be a problem. On the contrary, because Google always retrieves the images, even if your contact has opted to not show the images by default, the pixel will still detect the message as read. Your open rate will be even more accurate. However, this method will make it hard to detect the IP-address of the user. But that brings us to privacy.
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