At one time or other we've all asked that age old question what's in a
name? Well it's not an old age any more, it's the 21st century and the
question to ask today is "what's in a path?" In a word, everything. In a
few more words, the final destination of your email.
To borrow a little Jack Lalanne here, content is king and
architecture is queen but together you have the entire kingdom, or more
importantly the inbox. We know for a fact that content and spam filters
take a close look at your p's and q's to determine if the message in
your email is fit for general consumption. We know that every element in
your message contributes to the overall likelihood of your email being
filtered to the inbox vs. the spam folder. However I want to look at one
specific component of your email's content that may not get the
attention it should: the image path and URL.
An image path is simply a pointer to where the image lives out on the
internet. Email marketing is sent without any attachments so the images
that are rendered in the customer's inbox are by way of image paths or
URLs to the images. Easy enough, this has been the way it's done since
like forever, or at least 1999. But from to time I've been seeing people
forget that the actual link itself is as important as the image it
leads to. Let me give you an example:
<img
src="http://www.foo.com/images/banners/image.jpg">
>>> What's the problem with this image link?
If you said nothing you're wrong. There is a problem, it's the word
banner. ISP filters and other technology deployed across the internet
such as Spamassassin
or Privoxy, have
complicated rule sets designed to block banners, advertising and all
other manner of communication deemed to be UCE (unsolicited commercial
email). By naming the folder that contains your image "banner" you are
increasing the likelihood that your image, if not your entire email will
be outright blocked because you've declared it as a banner in so far as
a spam filter is concerned.
The idea here is to have intelligent and easy to read paths that
don't attempt to obfuscate what's in them, but also take into account
the imperfect nature of filtering technology. Avoid using the word
banner or variations thereof, in an image path, or for that matter
"ad(s)'.
The problems don't stop here, no the rabbit hole goes much deeper. We
live in a fast paced world defined, at times, by 140 characters. Our
lives move too quickly for war & peace, unless it can be squeezed in
between 60 minutes and grey's anatomy, so we short-hand a lot of stuff
including paths in our URLs, such as this:
<a href="http://www.foo.com/mar/mktgspcl/index.html">
Yes, it's March and you have a marketing special ad that you want to
link to from your email. Ok, so why didn't you say so? Sometimes it pays
to include the vowels if for no other reason than to avoid triggering
Spamassassin's consonant filter that eagerly checks for any string of
consonants with no vowels greater than 7 characters. By the way, the 7
character length is configurable to be 6 or 5 or anything the operator
wants it to be. The net-net here is that although the internet is full
of gibberish behind the scenes using plain English doesn't hurt once in a
while.
One last thing to keep in mind, image paths, or URL paths for that
matter, you should always make folder more than 2 characters. There are
specific rules that look for 2 character paths, and 3 character paths at
times, so an image folder called /img/ or /im/ should be named /image/
to avoid potential unpleasantries.
I know what's on your mind right now, "will any of this truly condemn
me to the spam folder?" Any of this? Hm, possibly not any of this, but
in conjunction with the 800 number in your email footer, the dollar
signs in your subject line, well you get the picture. To quote Depeche
Mode "everything counts in large amounts." Take control of your content
and steer the ship to where it needs to go. These are pretty simple
things to avoid and once you get the hang of it, you'll find you worry
less and sleep more.
Cheers!