How Do You Prefer Your E-Mail Newsletters?
There is much talk at the moment about e-mail formats for e-shots. If you are in the game creating them, the different ways e-mail clients read e-mails makes the job very difficult to create a standard.
Dave at Campaign Monitor, our e-mail tool of choice, has a call-to-arms regarding e-mail standards.
I for one am considering changing our e-mail newsletters to pure text, with more links to articles and the blog. At the moment, as you can see, 30% of the e-newsletters we sent in September were opened as HTML. A high percentage of the unopened ones must get read as text, otherwise surely people would unsubscribe? Out of those 339, only five people looked at the HTML version link on the website.
Comment by Patrick Jolly September 12, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
Preference for e-mail newsletters in graphics when from a trusted source
Comment by John September 12, 2007 @ 1:28 pm
I love a bit of eye candy but if the content (articles etc) are more enlightening, i’de be all for text-based mails.
But on the other hand, i do prefer graphics
Could you not just give people the option of text or html when subscribing?
Comment by Craig Killick September 12, 2007 @ 1:33 pm
Hi John,
The system auto-detects which email the recipients system will accept (multi-part).
I guess there is value in having two lists, although it may get fragmented. Very good point though - I think i shall investigate.
It’s worth saying, without sounding to sycophantic, Campaign Monitor are very receptive to any ideas from their customers - great product!
Comment by Vince September 13, 2007 @ 11:13 am
Hi,
Stumbled onto your site and this caught my eye.
It depends what your aims for the newsletter are. Having looked at the online version I’m guessing you’re looking more to improve long term brand affinity than directly drive sales (which I think is definately a great way of doing it). With this in mind, and seeing as you’re all about design, I’d say that moving to a text email would probably be a mistake.
Your newsletter is nicely layed out so It’ll be readable even if the HTML isnt opened (or images enabled) so you’ll get the best of both worlds.
Open rate is notoriously inaccurate now-a-days with image suppression being standard across most. Try and develop a more reliable metrix to make decisions on. If not clicks resulting in sales then why not clicks to surveys, clicks to competitions, clicks to onsite content, clicks to … The list is endless! But choose something that works for you.
Also, do the boring basics correctly - make sure your lists are clean, etc and you’ll have a much better idea of your true impact of every mailing.
Hope it goes well and good luck with the decision
Comment by John September 13, 2007 @ 1:51 pm
I’m also a user of Campaign Monitor, great email tool!
One thought though, people that receive text based emails only do so if their email program is setup for it, right?
Sometimes i prefer HTML emails (amazon etc) but then again prefer Text as i often use my PDA to read through emails when i’m out ‘n’ about…
But, saying that, you’re graphic designers, so would a text based email adequately communicate what you do (or what you’re good at?). It seems you could go either way, point of sale campaign and a article/blog campaign?
John
Comment by Craig Killick September 14, 2007 @ 12:13 pm
John,
I am actually quite surprised by the results so far. To be honest I though people would be moving away from the ‘hassle’ of HTML.
In terms of marketing, I have found personalised text e-mail to get the best ‘response’ rather than our newsletter that just sends info.
The fact that so many of our audience can not (or choose not to) receive the HTML version is quite telling but in terms of choice, I guess that the people who get it, would not want that delivery to change.
So, my conclusion so far is to not change a thing. Give the people what they want, which doesn’t impact the text receivers.
Thanks for the comment… Craig
Comment by Craig Killick September 14, 2007 @ 2:31 pm
Vince,
Completely agree with what you say. Our list is 100% opt-in and the newsletter is purely PR and brand-building.
Like your thoughts on metrics as well - may have a play with that.
Craig