When an image doesn’t show, or when a recipient is scrolling the mouse over a displayed image, you can let them see a text description of the image using the HTML "alt" tags in the message code.

It’s a good idea to use the "alt" tags for logos, headers, section titles and other images in your newsletters. In e-commerce emails you can include the "alt" tags to describe the product photos and banners.

A sample "alt tag" that displays the image description looks like this:

<IMG alt="some text here" src="C:\Documents and Settings\...\Disco\Disco_01.gif">

Type the description that would clearly tell the recipient what is on the image, for example, "Samsung Z400" if you write about mobile phones, or "Nissan Frontier" if you write about cars. A vague text like "Click here" or "Photo" doesn’t give an incentive to download and view the image. 

Using the "alt" tags in your HTML emails can be important because:

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You can send the HTML emails with Flash files in them, but the majority of your recipients won’t be able to view them. This is because only Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail use the operating system’s built-in browsers to render their email. Other email applications use their own, proprietary ways of rendering HTML. Plus, most people have anti-virus and anti-spam applications that block the code used to embed Flash files.

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A lot of people often put much of their time and efforts on the HTML version of their message and neglect the plain-text part. We think it’s a big mistake. Don’t ignore a plain-text version of your HTML email! You need it for the recipients who can’t (or won’t) view HTML. If you don’t bother to prepare the plain-text part of your HTML message, you’ll pass for a lazy spammer and can lose a number of your customers.

If you use G-Lock EasyMail for sending email campaigns, you just create your HTML message and the program auto-generates a plain-text version for you. If you don’t like how the plain-text part looks, you can edit it as you want separately from the HTML part. Then G-Lock EasyMail “ties” two versions together in “multipart format” and sends them out. Your recipients’ email application decides which version to display. You don’t definitely need any specific skills to create your plain-text email.

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AOL users tend to differ from other recipients on your list. Understanding their habits and preferences can help you optimize your newsletter for better delivery to AOL subscribers, or create a special copy of the original message that would find a broad response among this segment of your list.

The research shows that the majority of AOL users:

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With G-Lock Analytics tracking service you can clearly understand what is happening to your emails after they are sent.

G-Lock Analytics tracking service records the following data when an email is "tracked": IP address, event date and time, user defined "pass through" information, Link ID and campaign ID, where the subscriber is the person who receives the email.

When you are creating your e-mail message, you simply replace your links with our "track" links, and place a small image in your email (for HTML emails only). This is a transparent image that is placed within the e-mail. This web beacon records user defined "pass through" information, IP address, date and time of event, and campaign ID. The function of the web beacon is to report when an email has been opened.

With these types of reports you can figure out if your customers find your emails interesting, or what part of them they like more. For instance, if you are selling products online, and you send out a regular newsletter with a list of new products, you could use G-Lock Analytics tracking service to see what your customers are most interested in.

With G-Lock Analytics tracking service you can:

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