HTML Email Marketing – Do’s, Don’ts, and You Did What’s?

Yesterdays post about email marketing and newsletters generated some interesting responses.  Oddly, not a huge discussion in comments, but several emails.

I’ll address the questions in very broad terms here.

First, how do I know plain emails work?

The simple answer is…

I don’t.

I know what works for me.  HTML email marketing didn’t work as well as sending plain emails.  It may be that your email list like and respond to HTML newsletters with graphics.  Neither you nor I will know what method works best until it’s tested.

Why did I think to test plain emails?

Before My Local Business Online, I sent plain emails.  That’s what internet marketers do.  When I started building my list for MLBO, I thought I would look more professional sending a nice branded newsletter with logos and other images. 

Needless to say, it wasn’t working well. 

Then a friend recommended reading stuff from a guy called Jon McCulloch.  He talks a lot about email marketing and HTML vs plain emails.  So, I tried it.

Sure enough, my responses went up.

I’ll admit to not being an expert when it comes to email marketing!  Jon is.  I know he has quite a few articles floating around the web, so I popped into Ezine Articles and he’s there chatting about HTML emails.  I thought I would reprint one here.

HTML Email Marketing – Do’s, Don’ts, and You Did What’s?

By Jon Mcculloch

HTML email marketing is almost irresistibly tempting for anyone seeking to do email advertising because, let’s face it, it looks so cool sending all that wonderfully formatted and professional-looking email doesn’t it? I mean even the ‘little guy’ can look like a ‘player’ with a bit of work.

Um, no. The big problem with

HTML email marketing

Is… what looks fantastic at your end… often looks absolutely atrocious at the other. Here’s why:

HTML is a standard… but not every email client interprets it the same way. Like it or not every creator, manufacturer and developer of HTML rendering software has his own slant on things. And, rightly or wrongly, despite the standards, the same HTML is shown differently by different browsers and email clients.

For example, Google’s Gmail shows HTML differently from Hotmail and Yahoo (I know, because I’ve tested it). And then you have the standalone email clients like Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus, Outlook, and Lord knows how many others, each with its own idea on how things should look.

The upshot of all this is what YOU can see at your end as the email writer is NOT what everyone else is going to see — of that you can be sure. The only question is just how different is it going to appear to your readers.

And unless you’re prepared to test every email before you send it with, say, the top 20% of email clients that will represent the choices of about 80% of your readers, you’ll never know. In other words, you could be sending out emails that look like a dog’s dinner to your prospects, clients and customers… and you’ll never even know it.

Your pictures are NOT shown. There’s a second reason why what you see at your end isn’t the same as what your readers see, and it’s to do with security. When you include an image in an email, often it’s hosted remotely — say, on your website or somewhere else. And the idea is, when the recipient opens it, the email client downloads the picture and displays it.

Only… this is a huge security and privacy issue, so most decent email clients do NOT display images by default and instead show a message saying, in effect, “click here to see images in this message“. And people rarely bother.

Why would they? It pays to remember an important rule of marketing here: no one cares about you; all they care about is what’s in it for them.. So while you might try to offer some inducement for them click and show images, they almost never will and all you’ve done is put yet another obstacle in the way of your marketing efforts.

And in the meantime, these missing images all conspire to make your carefully-crafted emails look terrible.

Plain works best

In general plain-text or very simple HTML works best (by simple I mean use bold, italic, underline and link-anchors and that’s all you need). You get better readership and your click-through-rate tends to be higher.

Does this really work?

Yes. If you doubt me on this, just sign up to emails from the big-name Internet marketing gurus who test this kind of thing to death, and you’ll see probably without exception plain and simple is the way to go.

Give it a try and let me know how it works out.

Lead generation and direct response marketing specialist and copywriter Jon McCulloch is the author of ” BIG Marketing Muscle for Small Business”.

This book reveals the strategies he has used with his clients to realise response rates over 300% better than traditional techniques… and for a limited time you can download ‘BIG marketing Muscle for Small Business’ right now. His clients have sent over 1 million pieces using the exact same strategies he reveals in this book – so you know they’re tried, tested and proven to work in the real world.

And it’s free.

Your free book is waiting for you here:=> http://www.jonmcculloch.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jon_Mcculloch
http://EzineArticles.com/?HTML-Email-Marketing—Dos,-Donts,-and-You-Did-Whats?&id=6059366

Unfortunately, Jon’s link to his Marketing Muscle download no longer works.  I’ve pointed his link to his home page where he has another ebook to download.  I’m sure it will be just as useful.

Over to you…

Will you test plain emails to see if they work for you?