It’s summer here in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer can be a great time to take care of that list of things you were planning on doing “when you had time.”

Perhaps you could revisit your nonprofit’s emails.

Don’t let your emails look like this

Check out this email I recently received from one of my favorite brewers:

Email message with no text, just an empty image box

Kind of hard to read, isn’t it?

I can’t tell you how many emails I get from nonprofits each month that look almost like this.

Many people don’t allow images

One of the first things I learned about email safety was to only display images from trusted sources. Apparently, some creative bad guys can put bad programs on your computer through images. It’s far to techy for me. But I just decided not displaying images was easier than letting my computer get hijacked but a rogue program.

I bet I’m not alone.

Your image-laden email may look pretty. But what if your readers can’t see it?

A simple solution

If you use an email provider like AWeber [aff link], you have two options for your email: HTML and plain text. (Constant Contact offers this feature too.)

Image of both HTML and plain text input options

These providers “sniff” out whether subscribers are able to see images or not. If they can, they get your pretty image. If they can’t, at least they’ll see your message.

Does it take a few extra minutes to make sure your HTML message works as a plain text message. But if your message is worth sending, isn’t worth taking a little extra time to make sure your readers can see it?

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