Email Marketing – why you shouldn’t use an image background

In Mailchimp, and many other email marketing services, it’s simple to add an image as your campaign background. In Mailchimp training I strongly advise people not to add images as backgrounds and here’s why.

Email images don’t load

Many organisations still block images in email messages from loading by default. The recipient needs to click or tap a link in order to load images. If you use an image as a background and the image doesn’t load for the recipients then the campaign may look very unprofessional and, at times, strangely formatted.
As your email communication should reflect your brand, there is a significant danger that including an image as a background will damage your brand.

Your campaign won’t show at all

Gmail and some other email readers don’t show the content of an email message if it is larger than a certain size. The limit for Gmail is 102KB (this isn’t a Mailchimp issue and affects all email communication). The recipient will see an empty message and will be prompted to click a link to load the message in full. This looks unprofessional and will negatively impact your open and click rates.
Images are large in size and including a background image adds to the email file-size which increases the chance of the message being clipped.

Whilst we can easily add a background image to an email message, for the reasons above, this isn’t a good idea. Using a background colour has no marked negative effect on the file-size, only images cause issues.