Email Formats for Marketers
Let me pose a question to get your opinion. I don’t really have A/B testing data on this, just a hunch. I also think it depends upon the market. Our market is definitely more apt to call an email spam than most.
I believe that HTML content in emails has become more often harmful than helpful in marketing and sales efforts. Traditionally, when we have sent out newsletters to our subscribers, we have tried to make them colorful and designed with HTML. I worry that when people see emails with colors and designs, they immediately delete (or worse send to Spam even though they subscribed).
I also believe that other fancy stuff in an email will cause it to be deleted faster than necessary, including:
- Bold, colored, or italicized text
- Huge signatures
- Images in signatures
- Weird formatting
I’m not saying HTML doesn’t have it’s place. Some companies do great clean-looking HTML newsletters.
But over the past few years we have moved to be more simplistic in our emailing. It’s part of simplifying the things we do.
What are your thoughts on email formats?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
lance
I think you let the subscriber choose what format they prefer. This of course assumes that the recipient actually opted in to receive an email from you and you gave them the choice during opt-in. These days marketers all too often add to their list based on a pre-existing business relationship. While certainly legal I would hardly consider it a best practice. That type of bacn is a real issue that marketers are creating for themselves.
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
Great comment! Thanks and I agree that letting the subscriber choose is always ideal.
Conor
I have been moving further and further away from html and towards plain text emails with only 1 single link. I keep one single header image that is the only “branding” that I put there – on the hope that my brand means something to most of the people who signed up 😉