Are HTML Emails Being Ignored?
By Anna Johnson on April 1st, 2009Thanks to a tip from a reader, I took a look at a recent article by William Jones where he argues on TechRepublic.com that HTML email has seen its day. Plain text email, he says, is much more useful and readable given its compatibility with all types of devices.
It seems that because William Jones views more emails on his smartphone (a BlackBerry) than on his personal computer, he has become acutely sensitive to the difficulty downloading and viewing HTML emails.
William admits to having a long-standing preference for plain text emails. He says he’s never seen the appeal in rich text and images. Rather, he’s been concerned about their susceptibility to phishing scams (i.e. where URLs can be disguised as legitimate URLs, etc) and other security vulnerabilities.
Apart from that, William says that when his smartphone downloads an HTML email, his screen ends up full of HTML rather than actual content, and assuming that it’s just an ad, he typically deletes it.
So too, as more people read email on more kinds of devices, William Jones predicts that plain text emails will, once again, be preferred over HTML emails.
As Internet marketers we all have a vested interest in sending messages that our recipients actually read. Here at Kikabink News we handle the HTML versus plain text email in the following ways:
1. Email sign-up forms that are an ancillary part of a given webpage subscribe people to the HTML version of the newsletter;
2. Email sign-up forms that are on their own page give people the choice between signing up to the HTML version or the plain text version of the newsletter;
3. Each HTML and plain text email that’s sent out gives subscribers a link to visit in order to change their email preferences e.g. from HTML to plain text or vice versa.
Why are we biased towards HTML emails?
Firstly, we can track them in ways we can’t track plain text emails. Specifically, we can track the proportion of people who open HTML emails. We don’t have a clue about the number of recipients who open our plain text emails.
William Jones doesn’t say this, but if anyone claims that plain text emails are opened more than HTML emails, ask them for the evidence, because the average email marketer has no way of knowing when their plain text emails are opened.
The second reason for our bias is that, in computer based email clients, HTML emails look better and are more readable than plain text emails. Yes, even when images are not enabled (admittedly another problem with HTML emails).
That’s not just my opinion. That’s based on the vast majority of our subscribers choosing HTML over plain text when signing up on the pages that give them the choice between either format.
Having said that, I like plain text emails for conveying a more personal touch, and for that reason, many of the autoresponder series on our various websites are entirely plain text. In those cases we can’t track open rates, but we can track click-through rates. Not a perfect trade-off, but the one we’re happy with for now.
Notwithstanding the advantages of HTML emails from marketers’ and PC-based users’ point of view, the fact is that William Jones raises a VERY important and simple point.
As long as it’s still only practical for smartphones to display plain emails, then, if a significant part of your audience uses smartphones to read your emails, then you really ought to give your audience the option of receiving plain text emails.
