Tisk, tisk Zinch.  You broke one of the cardinal rules of email marketing - assuming that your users would turn on images in your email.  Note the second paragraph of the email, which references what should be a button for the user to update their profile:

zinch

Now, I’ve never seen this email with the images on, and I’m sure the button was beautifully designed, but what about the majority of users who view their image with images off? The biggest mistake here is referencing the existence of a “strangly large button”, and definitely leaves a bit of a disconnect for people who don’t actually see the button.  Though Zinch did use alt tags, so that users were still able to update their profile.

The moral of the story?  Never be reliant on images in email - don’t make them your only calls to action and definitely do not reference them in the main copy.  Instead, focus on designing your messages so that they work seamlessly both with and without images turned on.

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