Home Depot sends me an enticing daily email: one special item, on sale for one day only! But I have no idea what they’re offering because my email reader (Outlook for Mac 2011) does not load graphics without permission and Home Depot does not use ALT tags.
ALT tags are text that appear in the space reserved for graphics, when for some reason the graphics don’t load. In many email readers graphics are turned off by default, and the user has to make the decision to turn them on. It was only very recently that Gmail started loading graphics by default. And many security conscious companies still refuse to allow network users to open graphics.
Forgetting to put in an ALT tag (or being clueless) can lead to some peculiar effects. Like the message that I got from Hootsuite that said I needed to give them permission to keep contacting me, but I didn’t know who they were because their name was in the graphic. And the cookbook publisher which invited me to a launch event, but the date and venue were in the graphic. If I don’t recognize the sender and nothing appeals to me in the text I can see, how likely am I to investigate further? (Emails like Home Depot’s, with no text at all, are the worst offenders.)
In each of these cases it would have been a trivial task to code an ALT tag which conveys the day’s special, the sender’s identity and the venue. Even if the no-graphics group is 5% or 10% of your audience, why give those folks a reason to ignore your email?