(hubze) Jennifer and her husband owned a popular wine bar downtown. Their shop had more than 600 wines from all over the world. In addition to a great selection of wine, Jennifer stocked the store with artisan cheeses, beers, and gourmet foods. Excellent service combined with a relaxed atmosphere resulted in 4 and 5 star reviews, and tons of referrals.

Customers loved it when Jennifer organized a wine tasting.  Every now and then she’d have a special tasting when she discovered a new wine she knew would appeal to her customers.  Since these special tastings only happened 3 or 4 times a year, customers were happy to give Jennifer their email address.  Then they would be notified in advance of a special event.

Amy and her boyfriend were local and shared their love of a good wine. Now and then they’d drop into Jennifer’s shop to pick up a special bottle not available in their nearby supermarket.  They loved the ambience of the shop, the great service and discovering a vintage they’d never find on their own without Jennifer’s help. Naturally, Amy signed up for Jennifer’s email list so she’d be notified of any special tastings at the shop.

The wine bar hadn’t had a special wine tasting in over three months, and Jennifer had discovered a new wine last week that she knew many of her customers would love.  She organized the event and made sure she had enough cases of the new wine on hand, as well as the cheeses and other gourmet snacks her regulars enjoyed. Then she sent out a broadcast email to her list announcing the special wine tasting next Thursday. She’d just moved her substantial email list to a new email service provider that was affordable, and easy to use.

Amy was scrolling through her email on her phone as she rode the bus to her office.  There was one email titled, “Special event on Thursday”.  Nothing showed up on her screen but some image placeholders, so she deleted the email.  And that’s how Amy missed the Wine Tasting.

A recent Marketing Sherpa report showed that 67% of email recipients have images “turned off”.  And that’s when they’re using their regular email client on their PC.  No one knows what that figure is for mobile phones.

When Jennifer signed up for the new email service, she loved all the cool looking templates they offered.  They were easy to use, and helped her design what she thought were great looking emails.  Jennifer was pretty handy with Photoshop too, so creating images with embedded text for her broadcast emails weren’t a problem.  She tested every single email broadcast before she mailed it to her list.  And they looked great in Gmail!

Of course, Jennifer had turned on “display images” the first time she did a test from the new service.  It never occurred to her that a substantial portion of her customers didn’t have images displayed when reading their email.

Can your customers read your email?