Using Linked Images in Emails

Every regulatory authority needs to communicate effectively with its membership, and emailing is often the most convenient way.

However, email records are one of the largest consumers of online storage space, but it gets even worse when you’re embedding images. When you send out a general email, you’re saving not only thousands of email records, but also thousands of copies of the images inside them.

Fortunately, there’s a way around this problem, and that’s to use linked images inside your emails instead of embedding them.

Emails with linked images don’t actually include the image. Instead they use a snippet of code that tells email programs to seek out the appropriate image from the internet and to display it. This way, recipients still see the image, but you’re not actually emailing the complete image itself.

The only downside is that using linked images currently requires a bit of technical finesse. We’re developing an easy linked-image option, but in the meantime you’ll need to follow along. You’ll need an admin account and the image you want to use needs to be hosted on your server (which just means it’s being used on your website or is at least somewhere in the folder structure if you’re not outright displaying it). It all sounds much more daunting than it really is though, so let’s get started.

Using Linked Images in Emails

First, we’re going to go find our image. In the video demonstration above we use a logo as an example, since that’s likely the most common image you’ll use in your templates, and that’s what we’ll be referencing here.

Once you’ve found the logo you want to link to, right click on it and select Copy Image Address. We use Google Chrome in the demonstration, but this function is available in all the major browsers.

With the image link stored in your clipboard, head into Alinity and go to Lists > Email Templates, then select the template with the image you want to swap out.

In most templates, the logo is at the top, and if you examine most templates’ HTML code, you can see a huge ream of information that represents the image. That ream of information is why images take up so much space, especially when they’re copied thousands of times.

So let’s get rid of it now. It’s easiest to delete the image by just highlighting and deleting it from the main body.

Now go back to the HTML view and position your cursor where you want the image. You likely still want the logo to be the first thing recipients see, so position your cursor right at the start.

And there you have it. The image link is now in the email, and you can manipulate it just like you would an embedded image if you need to resize it or center it or otherwise format it. And when you do, you’ll notice that Alinity automatically adds the appropriate attributes.

But if you peek behind the scenes again, you’ll see how much less space is taken! Now when this template is used in mass mailings, you’ll only be copying that little tag thousands of times instead of the huge ream of information we saw earlier.

Linked images are the best way of getting images into emails because they’re not as memory intensive and thus help you control your disk space usage.

For more information about Alinity’s Correspondence module, contact us for a free demonstration.