Search For HTML Email Marketing For Your Business

You have started your Internet business . You have invested a lot of money in it.

You need enough money to pay your employees. You need sufficient returns for yourself. You want to have better infrastructure and make your business grow.

The most basic requirement for an Internet marketing company is the generation of traffic . Sales always logically follows traffic.

Naturally, if there are employees who take care of getting maximum traffic to your site, it’ll be extremely valuable for your business .

Traffic Assistants do exactly that. They are specially trained by experts to try and get maximum targeted traffic to your site.

HTML Email Marketing

Most email programs are now equipped to read HTML. Your logo, banner, bullets, and color elements can make your message jump off the screen. You can even include forms that allow customers to order instantly from your message. You can take advantage of impulse purchases that can lead to big increases in sales. It is best to create message that is in both HTML and text format; allowing the clients’ software to display the appropriate version. Also if possible, pre-qualify your customers’ desire for HTML.

Email Marketing Tips - HTML versus Plain Text

After you have set up your opt-in list and started collecting leads you need to decide whether to use HTML or plain text for your follow up and broadcast messages.

Each has their own advantages and disadvantages but it’s far safer and more effective to use plain text for all your messages because of a number of reasons.

The main benefit of HTML is that you can send high quality graphics and make your messages colorful and attractive to the reader. It also allows publishers to track open rates and click through rates.

But there are some major disadvantages with HTML that you should be aware of:

1. HTML messages take much longer to load (especially if the recipient has a slow Internet connection) and take up more disk space and many people simply delete them.

2. Email accounts display HTML messages in different ways and they can change the layout, font type, and size of your message. So, it appears totally different to the recipient.

3. Some recipients may not accept HTML messages at all. So your message simply appears as lines of code which most people don't understand and can't read.

4. HTML messages can be used to hide viruses in the code which can infect the recipient's computer when the email is opened which is why many people will not read them.

Sending messages in HTML format can dramatically reduce your response rates if you don't know how to use it properly, resulting in fewer sales and less profits. There are simply too many problems with HTML email and it’s not worth the effort.

If you want to create fancy messages why not set up a blog and use the layout and font of your choice and just send a short plain text email to your subscribers asking them to visit your blog to read the content.

Another option would be to allow each subscriber to select whether they want to receive HTML or plain text, but this just doubles your workload and you will have to create two versions of each message.

Successful HTML Email Marketing Issues

As the online world changed in the nineties from informational to commercial and highly competitive, marketers embraced the new technology and the need has arisen to send graphically appealing newsletters and marketing messages. You have only seconds to capture attention, and the right picture will grab quicker than the right copy, as they say, "a picture can be worth a thousand words". Just ask your clients if they would use plain white paper, rather than letterhead, to send an offline message to prospects and customers.

Today, the vast majority of all email clients can render (that is, display) HTML emails fairly well. It really comes down to message purpose, subscriber preference and multipart messaging. Studies show that roughly 95 percent of commercial messages sent today are sent as Multi-Part MIME.

Multi-part MIME is an older protocol that allows you to send both text and HTML versions of an e-mail in a single package, kind of like a sandwich. The recipient's e-mail program then displays the HTML version, if it is capable of reading that, or the text version, if it is not.

MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and is an Internet standard for the format of e-mail. Virtually all human written Internet e-mail and a fairly large proportion of automated emails are transmitted via SMTP MIME format. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and if nothing else, you'll learn a few more acronyms if you stick around. Internet e-mail is so closely associated with the SMTP and MIME standards that it is sometimes called SMTP/MIME e-mail.

While nobody can really agree on numbers and stats, we all agree on this: HTML Email Doesn't Work Properly for Millions of Recipients.

HTML email breaks in a wide variety of email inboxes. This is not due to your creative abilities or lack of HTML knowledge. It is due to the fact that the email client your recipient views your email in routinely breaks your message.

An email client (some "big picture" folks also call it Mail User Agent) is nothing but a computer program that is used to read and send email, such as Outlook. A mail server (also called a Mail Transfer Agent or MTA, or a mail exchange server) is a computer program that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another. Most of the time, since nobody has time to learn all the acronyms and terminology coined by those "big picture" people, used to know a mail server as the entire contraption (wires and all) that runs the program.

Depending on the email system, your HTML images may be blocked so recipients see a blank white box and/or your live hotlinks may not work properly. AOL 9.0, Outlook 2003, and Gmail are most infamous for blocking and/or breaking HTML, "for security reasons".

Many corporations have IT departments who can't wait for the day when all attachments and all HTML emails are eradicated. That is because in their world, anything that is not pure text is spam, virii, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, pure evil (ware) that makes mailboxes grow and users growl. As a consequence, most of those cubicle inhabitants - the end users - who have to sign a hundred page policies before they start getting busy on those corporate e-memos are unable to view and/or send HTML messages, whether the feature is turned off at a server level, or on their computers.

If you communicate to the B2B market , particularly large professional service firms, large law firms, many Global 2000 companies, HTML email compatibility will be a thorn in your side, as a lot of these companies use Lotus Notes.

The Issues Include

Here are some quick tips you can take if you have a significant Lotus Notes subscriber base:

1. Include a link at the top of HTML emails named "View Web Version" or something similar. The link sends recipients to a web hosted HTML version of the email (either on the email technology provider's server or the sender's server).

2. Also include an "Update Preferences" link and provide a web site update form that enables recipients to choose to receive Text rather than HTML.

3. Create complete Text versions for those who prefer not to receive HTML or cannot view HTML.

4. On opt-in forms, include an option to receive a Text version and potentially list tips (i.e., "If you are using Lotus Notes versions below R5, select Text").