Comments on: The problem with email marketing

By: Chris Tingom

Chris Tingom — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 13:38:18 +0000

Mark – That is actually a really smart recommendation.

By: mark rush

mark rush — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 10:08:49 +0000

for me its all about B2B or B2C, B2B is governed by bastard operators from hell who put filters are the root of email blocking html and other nasties, plain text goes straight through these – B2C dont have such restrictions imposed upon them – because of this htmlemails are more suited for this audience tho you need to be extra cautious because of narrowband implications

well thats my $0.02

mark

By: Chris Tingom

Chris Tingom — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 00:45:02 +0000

Truth be told I wrote this post three or four weeks ago and have not posted it until today and there is one big glaring error. But it doesn’t change the recommendation I wrote at the end.

The fact is that if you send a text only message there is no way to track whether it was opened. No way. The reason is text only means text only and the way you track read rates is through inserting a tiny invisible image (that pings the server). This is actually done with HTML.

So if you want to test, try it out sending a text only message and include some sort of promotional coupon code or something that lets you track results the standard way. On a personal level.

Thanks to James Archer for pointing out the glaring error.

By: AURUM3

AURUM3 — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 22:51:34 +0000

We have created several newsletters for clients and they do want the pretty version. What we did to get the email open by more people is to send the newsletter as plain text and html.

By: Tommy Chapin

Tommy Chapin — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 17:32:12 +0000

I think that an email newsletter with the same layout as the plain brainfuel web template here would actually be pretty easy on the eyes. I think I would put the nav bar on the right side though for email use so people could get right to the text.

By: Tommy Chapin

Tommy Chapin — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 17:29:27 +0000

Well, hmmm… Don’t you think that’s a little bit old-fashioned to think that way? I mean, almost every single email program out there supports HTML. Just because you don’t know how to send an HTML message (simply define the type as text/html) doesn’t mean that it’s so bad.

Colors, fonts, and pretty things can go a long way when used *correctly*.

Just my two cents.

By: Julian

Julian — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 16:39:36 +0000

I don’t even think about using HTML in e-mail. It’s just not meant to be that way. For me, e-mails have to be plain text, so no one will ever get an HTML newsletter from me. I don’t even know how to send it with HTML.
And then there is this consistency thing. When all automated notifications from a web application are send in plain text, isn’t it confusing to throw some over-styled HTML newsletters in?