Text or HTML? Make Sure Your Subscribers Have a Choice
According to a 2004 report by Jupiter Research, nearly 60% of e-mail users have the ability to receive HTML e-mails. Such e-mails earn twice the response of text e-mails—an impressive feat! Take advantage of this opportunity, but still give your subscribers a choice. By offering both HTML and text versions, you allow customers to select what works best for them— a courtesy that does more to boost response and interest than any other relationship builder.
You can also make use of multi-part messaging (sometimes referred to as MIME) technology, which essentially enables you to send every recipient a single e-mail that includes all of the available content-type versions, letting the recipient’s e-mail software figure out what to display. For example, you might send a text version, an HTML version, and even an AOL version. The e-mail client renders the highest supported version. So, Outlook would render the HTML content, and a portable device might render the text content.
The advantage is that the recipient doesn’t have to know whether they can accept HTML. But this can lead to fuzzy metrics. Talk to your IT folks or your ESP to find out exactly what is going to work for your program and how to use this technology to its maximum effect.
Another word of caution: Don’t believe your IT folks if they tell you that you don’t need to create a text version, because “the software will take care of it.” Automatic programs are famous for mangling HTML e-mails when turning them into text—leaving a shell of their intended look and feel. Always create a text version using the principles outlined here.
Matt Blumberg and Michael Mayor are the driving forces behind Return Path, an e-mail performance company. Collaborating with them on this project are their colleagues, e-mail strategists Stephanie A. Miller and Tami Monahan Forman. This article was excerpted from their new book, “Sign Me Up! A Marketer’s Guide to Creating E-mail Newsletters That Build Relationships and Boost Sales (iUniverse Inc., 2005) © 2005 Return Path, Inc. All rights reserved.
