Use images in your emails

Business Benefits

Inform and drive user action by using images in emails.


Use pre-built templates or online tools such as Canva, Snappa, or Bee to create your images.

When creating your images, keep the copy concise and to the point. Do not try and add too much information or too many offers. Your images should give a snapshot of the content of the email, with your body content going into more detail.

Use the optimum size for email marketing images: width under 600px and height under 600px.

The height is less important than the width. You may have an image with a height of more than 600px, but you must keep the width to under 600px. If you are using product images or multiple images in one row, ensure the sum of the width of all these images does not exceed 600px. For example, if you have 3 product images you want displayed side by side, each image will need to be less than 200px in width.

Save your image as either a PNG, JPEG, or GIF if using animated images.

Try to keep your image size under 1MB if possible. You can do this by selecting the save for web option in many editors.

Upload your image to an image hosting site such as Flickr and Photobucket, or directly into your email marketing platform.

Most platforms allow you to upload your image directly by going to the image library, then upload a new image from PC. Do not try and embed your image directly into your email; it will cause rendering issues and may get your email flagged as spam.

Open the email marketing template you want to use the image in and drag an image block to the preferred location.

Select the image from your image library, or add in the address of where your image is hosted if you’ve used an image hosting service instead.

Add a description of your image in the alt text box in the image options

This text is what will be displayed if the image fails to load for a user. For example, if your image is promoting a discount code for 20% off, your alt text would be 20% off discount with code DISCOUNT20.

Include the CTA both on your image and in the body of the email, in case your image does not display in your user’s inbox.

Often images are not automatically downloaded, especially on mobile. So if you only display important information on your image, your user will miss it altogether.

Test your email across multiple devices and inboxes to ensure the image renders correctly.

Test manually by setting up multiple inboxes with different providers such as Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail, and sending a test email to each. Then view the email in each inbox on different devices like phones and tablets. Alternatively, use a service like Litmus, which will do this automatically for you.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T15:35:32Z