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By Anna Curnow, Internet Strategist

Email marketing can mean so many things; newsletters, alerts, friend get friend campaigns, customer service, sales offers and so on. Each type of email marketing piece needs to be built with the appropriate formatting to ensure the best response rate possible. Let’s take a bit of a refresher course in formatting for email marketing!

What do we mean by formatting?
There are four main types of email format:
• HTML – these emails have text and pictures. There is no additional functionality like animation, music or order forms but it looks and feels like a printed piece. Links can be hidden underneath text so that when you click on particular words or pictures you are taken through to a website.
• Text – emails in plain text don’t have any colours or pictures. Links through to websites are shown in their full entirety.
• HTML without images – by using simple HTML you can make an email show colours and hide links below text but not add in any pictures. This can make your message stand apart from text emails without having to download pictures.
• Rich Media – emails that use rich media will have flash animations, music, video, and order forms actually within the email itself that run in the email client (eg Outlook)

How does it work?
An HTML email works pretty much the same way as a webpage only it is ‘rendered’ (put together) by an email client (eg Outlook). This means that the email client has to read the HTML and create a page according to the HTML instructions.

For example, the following HTML code is what is sent out to the email recipient:

<P><IMG height=53 src="https://secure.minervamail.com/clientimages/webenz/logo1.gif" width=187 border=0></P>
<P><FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">WELCOME TO OUR EMAIL</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Please visit our website </FONT><A href="http://$[link_212]/" target=_blank><FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">here.</FONT></A></P>
<P>&nbsp;</P>

The email client reads it and turns it into this:

WELCOME TO OUR EMAIL

Please visit our website here.

 

Opportunities and Benefits of each
While in the early days of email marketing we all got really excited about Rich Media. It felt like we were going to be able to send interactive TV style commercials straight through into our customers inboxes. Imagine that! Customers would be able to buy our product while watching a video about the product and listening to our jingle.

The reality of bandwidth, connection speeds and permission marketing concepts brought us down to earth with quite a bump. As marketers we were flummoxed when some of our customers even said they preferred text emails. But how were we going to include the jingle in a text email?

It soon became apparent that there were times when each type of email was appropriate – even plain old boring text!

HTML – most customers are used to HTML email now and it can even breed a sense of familiarity as your customers get used to seeing and trusting your colours and look and feel. This is perhaps the most commonly used of all the formats.

Unfortunately HTML mail does occasionally get stopped by some vigilant firewalls and some older versions of Lotus notes can do some pretty unpleasant things to the HTML layout making your emails look really odd. However, in the main, HTML mail is a great way of communicating your message and brand to your customers.

Text – no longer considered boring, the text email now has a sense of personalness and urgency that HTML doesn’t have. Our friends tend to send us text email about stuff that we really want to hear about. From a marketing point of view a text email can convey that urgency that an HTML email might not.

HTML without images – this is the kind of half-way house between the decorative HTML email and the plain (if personal) text email. It can be a way of dressing up a text email to get words to stand out by being in a different colour. However, these days it can look a little “homemade” which is fine if you are organizing the school fair.

Because HTML without images doesn’t have images (obviously) you are less likely to get caught out by firewalls when sending this format of emails.

Rich Media – as this style of email marketing needs really chunky bandwidth and speedy connections only use this one when you are sure that your customers are really high-end users. Having said that this article shows that when the situation is right, the returns are quite spectacular.

Be warned though, rich media emails are frequently stopped at the firewall so you need to be really sure of your relationship with those customers (and their IT teams) when sending.

The future
The future of email formats can really be divided into two stages. Firstly, I believe that the immediate future (the next 2 years or so) will not see any dramatic new formats being introduced. What we should see will be adjustments to the current functionality to increase and preserve the effectiveness of permission based email marketing. Things such as ‘handshake technology’ that will allow recipients to indicate their acceptance of a message will improve things for both the recipient (who won’t be bombarded with SPAM) and for the sender (who will know that their message is being welcomed).

Further out from that could see the advance of video and voice over IP technologies which will revolutionise the interactivity of email communications. Imagine being able to order through an email using your voice after viewing a 3d video demonstration of the product!

The possibilities are endless.