Top Reasons for Mailchimp Image Problems

Are the images in your Mailchimp email campaigns displaying pixelated, distorted or otherwise look odd? Here are the three most common reasons that images may not be showing correctly.

Adding Images to Text Blocks

Mailchimp has many types of content blocks that you may use in your email campaign. The text block is made to add text and there are numerous blocks to which images may be added. We can add an image to a text block but, for whatever reason, images often distort when adding images this way.

Only ever add images to an image content block. Mailchimp even includes various content blocks which allow adding an image to the left, right, top or bottom of text; these are the content blocks you should be using if you need text to the side of an image. Unfortunately if you want to wrap text around an image you are going to need to add an image to a text content block (and you will see problems when viewing the image in an email campaign).

Using the Wrong Image File-type

There are many file-types that may be used to save images (SVG, BMP, TIFF, PNG etc.). Because of the wide variance of capabilities of email readers (and lack of standards), and the types of image file-types they support, we need to be very conservative when sending an email campaign containing images. The safest image file-types to use in an email campaign are JPG/JPEG, GIF or PNG. Unfortunately if we use an image saved as any other file-type the image may not display at all or, worse still, may render incorrectly.

As a side note, a PDF file is not an image file-type. A PDF file may contain an image but is not an image file-type.

Your Images Are Too Small

I’ve delivered Mailchimp training and consulting for many years. The first question I ask people when they mention images “not looking correct” in email campaigns is whether they’ve added an image less than 600px wide. The standard width of a Mailchimp email message is around 600px wide and, if adding an image less than 600px wide, the image may display wider than it’s original size (e.g. if you add an image of 400px wide it may display at 600px wide and will look terrible).

Alot of this issue is caused because of the lack of standards in email message rendering and inconsistent use of CSS. Paired with responsive email templates and custom template coding (that may use percentage values mixed with pixel values as image width and height attributes) this creates a recipe for disaster. It honestly is safest, and will cause fewer headaches, by adding images that are at least 600px wide.