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A
Anonymous
November 8, 2016
Question

Image maps and hot spots

  • November 8, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 3404 views

How do I include images with hotspots?

My dreamweaver generated code doesn't work when stuck into my template. Code below. Any suggestions?

carol

<p><img src="info.vantagewest.org/rs/352-NGH-108/images/Auto_Email_600a.jpg" alt="Auto_Email_600a.jpg" height="650" width="600" /><map name="m_Auto_Email_600a" id="m_Auto_Email_600a">

<area shape="rect" coords="300,568,600,631" href="vantagewest.org/banklocally/" target="_blank" title="Why Shop Local" alt="Why Shop Local" />

<area shape="rect" coords="0,568,301,631" href="vantagewest.org/loans-credit/loans/auto/" target="_blank" title="Check Auto Rates" alt="Check Auto Rates" />

</map></p>

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2 replies

A
Anonymous
November 9, 2016

Hey Carol,

Not a Marketo specific answer but using hotspots in emails is not a good idea. Many popular email clients don't support several of the CSS tags required to use these. If you have to keep this sort of functionality your best bet would likely be to slice the image and link each slice. But this would likely cause some rendering issues as well.

@Joe Reitz​ could probably give some more details around best practices here.

    Joe_Reitz
    Joe_Reitz
    Level 8
    November 11, 2016

    Thanks, Brent Levi​!

    Carol Schumaker​ – not a ton to add on this point without seeing the email itself. But when designing for emails versus web, there are a whole host of differences in what will work for some clients, but not others. So it becomes a game of designing for the least common denominator, and what will render correctly for the greatest number of people in your distribution. Because of that, Brent is completely on point here: linked CSS hotspots in email is a no-go.

    Based on the question, I'd guess that you use some image-heavy emails. As a best practice, I would mix it up a bit more and rely on a balance of images and text, with CSS buttons for your CTAs. This way, if the reader has images turned off, they still have a chance to quickly get a sense of what the email was about, and can make a judgement call as to whether they actually want to read or engage with your offer.

    Hope that helps!

    If it doesn't look cool, you're probably doing it wrong.
    A
    Anonymous
    November 11, 2016

    I concur with Joe--you should have a balance of text and image. And specifically, there's a study from Email on Acid floating around that suggests that you need at least 500 characters of text to avoid spam filters. After that 500 character count has been reached, the text-to-image ratio doesn't matter.

    https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-development/does_text_to_image_ratio_affect_deliverability

    Another e reason to avoid a clickable image/all-image email is how anti-spam tools can impact your reporting. We recently sent a series of all-image emails with a link back to a landing page--in essence, the email was nothing but a big .jpg call-to-action button.

    A high percentage (over 80%) of leads that were reported as having clicked the image did not report as having visited the target landing page.  Further research suggests that some anti-spam tools (Barracuda specifically) generate a "click" on such an image without the corresponding web view. If we used the Clicked Link in Email for any subsequent program (scoring or otherwise), this would be a false positive.

      A
      Anonymous
      November 14, 2016

      Thanks everyone for the info!

      The emails are image heavy. (My manager likes image only emails.) Now I have a few things to discuss w/him. The 500 characters of text, we always have in the form of a lengthy text disclosure.

      The "(Barracuda specifically) generate a "click" on such an image without the corresponding web view" answers a few questions I had on the anomalies I've been seeing in the reporting.

      Does anyone have a CSS button I could see/modify I don't have it in my templates.

      Thanks,

      Carol S.

      SanfordWhiteman
      SanfordWhiteman
      Level 10
      November 15, 2016

      The emails are image heavy. (My manager likes image only emails.) Now I have a few things to discuss w/him. The 500 characters of text, we always have in the form of a lengthy text disclosure.

      Modern spam filters aren't dumb enough to fall for filler/footer text as if it's actually the primary viewable content -- they know what the end user actually sees.  Spammers often attempt to game the system with text stuffing, which usually fails.

      You can either like image-only emails or like getting to people's inboxes.  Very hard to have both.

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