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I received an email today from Mirae Asset Mutual Fund asking me to subscribe to their Weekly Market Tracker. This EDM (electronic direct mailer) like many others made me take an extra frustratingly trivial step of enabling images in my email client to realise the intent. I ask myself - why do advertisers send out emails with only big fat images. Why can’t it be a combination of text that I can read instantly and images for illustration? Mirae Asset's EDM is only an example. I have the same problem with most other mailers I receive. It so happened to be the first mailer from Mirae after having invested in a fund of theirs, and hence my interest in the mailer. I thought the tracker was already in the email, and was dissappointed.

I get the drift that EDMs may use images to maintain design consistency, to create a visual impact or use non-web fonts; but don’t people today keep images blocked by default in email clients. Isn't it a default setting in all email clients? Thanks to bandwidth being limited the experience only worsens on the mobile phone when such an email arrives. It’s a waste of time and money. Advertisers should know that the number of people who open these emails is small. The average open rates vary in the range of 20% to 40% (campaign monitor). Advertisers need to pay attention to these details and remove hurdles between information about their own services and consumers. If not, these hurdles will only increase the distance between advertisers and consumers.

Using HTML format with text to convey message and images only to enhance the look and feel has benefits that people behind the Mirae Asset EDM have either overlooked or are not experienced enough to understand. Today, a simple search on the internet can land you with many free HTML based email templates. These may not be readily usable for businesses; but can give a very good idea of possibilities. Skilled resources for HTML are not hard to find - if there is intent. Less of images also mean that the email is lighter; which means it’s quicker to load on clients and consumes less bandwidth when being sent to a database that’s more than a few thousands.