Forum Moderators: skibum
Anyone have a line on hard data here? I have a few hard cases I'd like to convince.
Plain text promo emails written in english, are almost a relief, in comparison. ;)
cyril_kearney: And will you handle the current terrorist crisis by not flying again, staying out of tall buildings and never reading your plain mail again?
nope...but if an airport isn't checking everyone's baggage, if they aren't checking ID, then I shall fly from somewhere else if at all possible...security has been an aspect of choosing an airline for most of my adult life, at least here in Europe...my experience of airport security has always been pretty positive...it seems to be done by people who know what they are doing and who care about it...if I thought that was the case with the IT people at Government agencies then I'd trust them too...all the evidence suggests that it isn't
it has to be the worst isp in the world.
and dont get me started on how good their browser is.
I would have thought because they have a massive advertising budget and appeal to mom and pop type users.
There are many unpatched and unprotected holes in outlook. That's not a fud. In the world of "i love you" and the dozens of MS viruii, I don't think you can even trust raw html with ms products.
I know that some day in the future, some kind of full featured email will be a standard. And that will be good, as long as we can tolerate all the lousy graphic design that's bound to fill our inboxes. But right now, it just isn't safe.
HTML email is only a toy and it needs a government warning. However, my main interest is still in what works, not what I prefer. That's why studies that show better RESULTS from plain-text campaigns lit up my radar screen.
I don't know where you could get an unbiased study, the folks who track this type of information probably fall into the category of those who send "fun" email and have a heavy bias towards html email.
I think it would be reasonable from a client perspective, to test both methods on any given campaign and derive solid results on a case by case basis.
I have a strong background in print and can tell you that the mailer, catalog or whatever you find in your mail box is probably the result of 10 or 12 test mailings that were sent to guage response and conversion. You just never know what works for a given product offering until you test it.
BTW, the minimum quantity for an effective test of a list/offering is 5,000 recipients. You should get some realistic projections from a list that size.
I would just like to add my two-pence worth.
thre are three issues here
1. Do you want higher click through rates?
2. Do you want all your recipients to recieve your email?
3. Do you want both?
Looking at stats from our email/CRM engine, better clickthru results are archieved with a well designed html page.
However, not everyone wants html and not everyone has a html enabled email client. To these we send a text version. That way everyone is happy.
Our strategy is simple we make sure the clients recipient gets the opportunity to choose html or text emails. For those, we are not sure about, we send MIME emails. Our programmers have also wrote sniffer html/images into the engine to check whether the recipeint has html enabled emails (we get a 95+% success rate with this). If the sniffer finds the mail client is html enabled we send html and if not text.
html vs TEXT maybe be important, but done forget The subject line. you still need to the recepient to open up the email.
