Digital Media for Email


Implementing digital media into your email content will complement the copy and value to the story you're looking to share with your readers. For an improved user experience and web accessibility, images must have alternate text. This text should be a short description of the image itself or how it relates to the other content. Typically, this is about 3-5 words. Images with a higher contrast value provide greater accessibility.

Selecting Images

Pepperdine University Media Bank is a reliable resource that is updated regularly and provides assets that are inline with the Pepperdine University Brand.

Images and the Marketing Cloud

Saving and uploading images into the Marketing Cloud will need to follow a standard process, name your photos in the following format prior to uploading into Marketing Cloud; Year-description.jpg (ex: 2015-willy-the-wave.jpg).

The Image file sizes should not exceed 200KB and should have a resolution should be maintained at 72PPI. 

If you're on a Mac, ImageOptim is the best solution; for Windows users, FileOptimizer

There are three files types applicable to email;

.PNG files provide the highest quality of images on the web and work best with all images. A con is that .PNG files are typically a larger size than other formats.

.JPG files have the benefit of being smaller in file size, however, they compress when uploaded and have the potential of distorting online.

.GIF files are often applicable and best for animated graphics. These are also often smaller in file size and can be applied to portray a video. A con to applying a GIF is that they may freeze; so, the messaging should be on the first pane. These should also be linked out to a video on a website.

NOTE: TIFF and BMP file types do not upload properly into the email system.

A video is not hosted in an email, it is hosted on the website.