Yostivanich

I have recently been involved in a project at my cur­rent job (Stu­dent Assis­tant for the T-STEM Cen­ter at TTU – the job rocks) in cod­ing up an email newslet­ter. I have been doing research on the side read­ing blog posts and such regard­ing the HTML vs. text email bat­tle. For those who don’t know, the issue is whether email should be strictly text or include HTML ele­ments. The text emails are your basic plain vanilla text email you receive from your friends and col­leagues detail­ing an issue or how their day is going. The HTML newslet­ter is the one from shops and stores with images, back­ground col­ors, all kinds of stuff going on in it. In short the HTML is a mar­ket­ing tool and the text is a correspondence.

That is my response to this issue, the HTML newslet­ter is designed as a mar­ket­ing tool. Major­ity of peo­ple real­ize images will cap­ture your atten­tion, heck even Scoble knows that. Also the HTML allows you to place your cus­tomized logo in there, to present in essence a web page to a per­son. This allows a com­pany to take their mag­a­zine ad con­vert it to HTML and send it out, cre­at­ing a uni­fied expe­ri­ence in adver­tis­ing as well as being able to incor­po­rate images and col­ors into a company’s uni­fied brand. HTML allows for mar­ket­ing to be more effec­tive and allows for a richer expe­ri­ence for the reader of these emails.

At the same time, cor­re­spon­dences are nor­mally basic text and for a good rea­son. Text is fast, sim­ple and easy to both read and write. Basic cor­re­spon­dences should not take half the day to cre­ate, that would be ridicu­lous. No one would use email as a means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion if it took that long to tell Aunt Petu­nia that Cousin Earl is get­ting mar­ried in a month. Heck the mes­sage might take a month to write depend­ing on how fancy you wanted to get.

It is for this rea­son that I feel that HTML newslet­ters are not an evil or even bad thing. If the pur­pose of your newsletter/message is mar­ket­ing some­thing then go ahead and use HTML. How­ever if you are sim­ply com­mu­ni­cat­ing to either your friends, busi­ness asso­ciates or even send­ing out a basic infor­ma­tional newslet­ter then you should stick with basic text.

All of this does of course come with sev­eral lim­i­ta­tions; you should present users with the option to select HTML or text newslet­ters if using HTML, always have an opt-in pol­icy and a quick and easy unsub­scribe process, never spam or even come close to spam, most impor­tantly make sure the newslet­ter works and is view­able in all email clients and pro­vide a link at the top to view it online some­where on your site.

Exam­ples For Each:

HTML:

1. New items up for purchase

2. Sim­i­lar items avail­able for pur­chase to one a per­son just purchased

3. Monthly newslet­ter for a store/purchasing center

4. It will hon­estly enhance user expe­ri­ence and you test that it goes over well with your clients/customers

5. The newslet­ter is sent out less than once a week, prefer­ably once a month, unless prompted via a user action

TEXT:

1. Gen­eral correspondences

2. You are not sell­ing anything

3. The newslet­ter is not sell­ing any­thing only pre­sent­ing information

4. The newslet­ter is sent out more than once a week

5. The newslet­ter informs the user of an com­monly occur­ring action on your web page (A mes­sage is received addressed to myself via Facebook’s inter­nal mes­sag­ing system.)

6. The major­ity of your users will only respond to text based emails or use email clients that do not sup­port HTML emails (A com­mon enough occur­rence in the open source world.)

I think this is a pretty fair stan­dard and seems to be the way the major­ity of most com­pa­nies are going in terms of emails. The largest prob­lems is when peo­ple embed an image as part of the sig­na­ture on their emails or com­pa­nies send­ing out HTML email for every­thing and anything.

jtyost2