There’s growing evidence that Gmail is disabling images for senders that users had previously whitelisted and enabled images for. Near-term this means that your open rate may dip, especially if a considerable percentage of your subscribers use Gmail, which is very likely if you’re a B2C marketer. Depending on your exposure to Gmail, you may consider adding whitelisting instructions to the top of your emails for a few weeks or emphasizing it if you already have it.
Under normal circumstances I don’t recommend running a whitelist request at the top of your emails. The real estate at the top of your emails is precious and if subscribers haven’t whitelisted you after a few requests (including the requests on your sign-up confirmation page and in your welcome email) then they’re not likely to ever whitelist you.
(Tip of the hat to Darren Schott at Blair for helping me realize that this was a widespread problem.)
4/29 UPDATE: It appears that even when users re-enable images for a sender that images are being turned off for future emails from that sender. Gmail is aware of this issue and reportedly working on it. In the meantime, your open stats will continue to be affected.
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6 comments:
When you say "defaulted back", do you mean that this has happened before, and that it is a conscious decision on the part of Gmail?
I use Gmail, and was on the Gmail forum looking for an answer to why it wasn't displaying images anymore for whitelisted people. It would appear that it is a glitch in the system that they are working on. Do you have any information to the contrary?
What I mean is that Gmail has images off by default--so when you receive that first email from a sender you have to whitelist them by enabling images from that sender. A few days ago Gmail began ignoring senders that you previous whitelisted and began treating them as new senders--meaning that you have to enable images from that sender again.
In my Gmail, I've had to re-enable images from previously approved senders, several times, in fact. It would seem to be a Gmail glitch.
Yes, I'm now seeing that too. When I enable images for a sender it's not sticking and I'm having to do it over and over.
Hi,
Thank you for relaying this information !
I've got just one question about what you called a "whitelisted senders". Are they sender added to our contact or sender for whom we click on the link "Always show picture from ...." ?
Thanks in advance for your answer.
In the case of Gmail, I'm talking about hitting the "Always show images" link. But in general, whitelisting is adding the sender's address to your address book. For most webmail clients that act also enables images.
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