When to use plain text and when to use html with e-mailshots and e-marketing

<body> <center> <table border="0" width="100%" height="100%" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="7"> <tr> <td valign="middle"> <p class="h1"><font color="#DC100A" size="4">Why plain text for e-mail marketing  </font></p> </td> <td valign="top">   </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top"> <p class="Body"> </p> <p class="Body"><b><font size="2">A choice of two</font></b></p> <p class="Body"><font size="2">There are two key formats for e-mail marketing: </font></p> <ul> <li> <p class="Body"><font size="2"><b>Text-based e-mail messages</b>, typically sent using MS Word or any number of CRM systems such as Goldmine, Act or SalesForce. By plain text we mean no graphics (whether technically HTML, plain text or rich text). The best of these look like they are hand written prospecting e-mails rather than mass merged marketing e-mails. </font></li> <li> <p class="Body"><font size="2"><b>Graphical HTML e-mail marketing</b>, generated by mass e-mail marketing tools. These almost always have embedded 'tracking' that, in theory, allows you to monitor who opens, who forwards and who clicks through from your e-mail marketing campaign.  </font></li> </ul> <p class="Body"><font size="2"><b>Horses for courses</b></font></p> <p class="Body"><font size="2">If the objective of your e-mail is to raise awareness or get people to click through to a web page, then highly graphical e-mails are fine, so keep using them. However, if your objective is to get people to reply to, or forward your e-mail, then you should reconsider: tracking works by using technology that creates four serious problems:</font></p> <ol> <li> <p class="Body"><font size="2">MS Outlook blocks images and tracking unless the reader has added you to their safe senders list - <b>unlikely</b></font></li> <li> <p class="Body"><font size="2">These e-mails look awful on Blackberries etc - the images simply appear as long web addresses.</font></li> <li> <p class="Body"><font size="2">Any firewall worth its salt can spot these are e-mailshots not personal messages.</font></li> <li> <p class="Body"><font size="2">The default MS Outlook (2003  onwards) security settings will generate the following alert when people try and reply to or forward e-mails with any kind of tracking:</font></li> </ol> <p class="Body" align="center"><font size="2"><img border="0" src="../images/ScaryAlert.jpg" width="309" height="190"><br> </font><b><font size="1">The default alert generated by Outlook when someone<br> tries to reply to a e-mailshot sent with tracking</font></b></p> <p class="Body"><font size="2">This could therefore mean that your attempts to measure the success of your campaigns will, in fact, be the cause of their failure. </font></p> <p class="Body"><font size="2"><b>Conclusion </b></font></p> <p class="Body"><font size="2">I personally get involved in business-to-business more than consumer marketing, and here the immediate measure of success for a campaign is assessed in terms of how many replies it generated. For this reason I always recommend that clients stick to simple, inexpensive personal messages sent though simple technology. <b>They have all seen response rates improve by an order of magnitude. </b></font></p> <p class="Body"> </p> </td> </tr> </center> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="bottom"> <p align="right"><font size="2">(c) 2007 Boost Marketing</font> </td> </tr> </table> </body>