e-newsletter: to H or not to H

[john harding]

About two years late, I'm trying to get round to starting newsletters. I read a lot about the advantages of an attractive, well-designed HTML email, and a lot about what goes wrong with them and how they provoke wrath even if you send in plain text as well.

So I wondered if the Actinic family has any thoughts about it?

[leehack]

HTML ones all the way for me, unless you want it to look like a campaign from the 1990s. People who want them will want html ones IMO, the rest are not important enough to make you move away from ideal setup for the possibles.

[Mike Hughes]

HTML for me too.

The only ones that can get away plain text are personal emails or emails around a single topic.

As soon as you start putting more than one thing in an email you need to structure it and make it look good. With a newsletter you're typically putting lots of content in to keep it interesting and you need the structure and graphics to let people focus in on the bits that interest them and ignore the rest.

Mike

[Duncan Rounding]

Some email newsletter creation software allows you to make both HTML and Plain Text. Many email clients will then display the relevant version depending on the user settings in the client.

[fergusw]

There are many, many factors surrounding the success of an email marketing campaign:
Time of day, email subject, personalisation, frequency, branding, B2B or B2C etc.
The most important for me though has to be content. Valuable, informative and engaging content targeted specifically at (and for) the recipient will yield a greater return.

Example: Recently we undertook an email campaign for one of our clients where a regular HTML based "corporate" email was sent out every month, achieving around a 5% click through, resulting in good sales.
We additionally sent out text based email, personalised to the recipient, with a clear, simple message and personalised promotional offer and achieved a 30% return with vastly increased sales.
The combination of HTML and personalised TEXT emails worked very well for that B2B customer.

[leehack]

Smartphones = text email, PCs = html emails perhaps?

[fergusw]

Smartphones = text email, PCs = html emails perhaps?

A very interesting area right now: smartphones & HTML emails.

More and more people are checking emails on smartphones.

The best bet just now is to have a link at the top of any HTML with links to web/smartphone friendly web versions.

[leehack]

Sounds reasonable, graphics on a smartphone do not have the same impact IMO and just slow the process down. We can't be far off a reliable email system that can work out whether smartphone or not and serve up content according to user preference.

A html email on my blackberry usually gets binned straight off, on my PC it at least gets a few seconds of my attention.

[Mike Hughes]

Smartphones are an interesting issue. I now check personal emails on mine but all I do initially is check to see if they're important or urgent. If not then they're left for later, I don't really want to dealing with email on the phone unless I have to.

The result though is that anything else only gets looked at if I decide it's worth looking at again. Probably 98% fail this test so just get deleted without me looking at them again. They've had their 1 second of glory.

Mike