An enewsletter
from Citibank

Blame it on email reader restrictions, reputation scores or coding errors, but images and links in emails - what e-newsletters, product offers and event invitations rely on - are often stripped out according to a new study by the Email Experience Council (via DMNews).

Reviewing 1,000 emails, the EEC found that 21 percent appeared completely blank when images were turned off or stripped by a variety of email clients. An additional 28 percent showed email copy but had no working links.

More than 70 percent of companies struggle to create a deliverable email, according to the EEC, which recommends working with a company to test image rendering across multiple email clients. Doing so helps to increase response by as much as 87 percent, it said.

However, some 95 percent of vendors do not offer rendering services. Often, the quick fix is to design two versions of an email: with images and without.

EEC pointed out that, in the future, rendering emails specifically for SmartPhones will be of significant concern.