HTML has long been seen as the fancy leader head and shoulders beyond plain text emails.

You get more formatting options and you can add pictures.

So aren’t HTML emails better?

Not necessarily. Take a look at this:

This arrived just this afternoon. Now, I’m sure it looks pretty once I’ve clicked to make sure all the images are downloaded. But that’s the whole problem. All I see is a black background and lots of little red crosses.

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75% of email recipients are using some form of Outlook.

And that means if you create an entirely image based email – your recipient has to actively do something in order to simply see what the email is about.

Because people receive so many emails nowadays, if you do this, you are simply erecting another barrier for your customers.

So if you do a HTML based email – don’t construct the entire thing out of images. If you must use images, then use them intelligently along with text – so you;re not left with a blank screen

Quite apart from anything else, it’s going to be more expensive to build in the first place because you’ll probably have to pay a web designer to put it together for you.

I don’t have anything against HTML emails. But I do know that wherever you oblige people to do something extra, the number of readers will always go down. Of all the people you send the email to, a percentage will not even bother to read it unless they really want to. In which case they have to manually download the images for the email.

I did download the images.

It turns out the email was actually very pretty. And it had a link to an Autumn menu (mmmm…) and a nice little voucher (woo hoo! Money off!) but I didn’t get to see any of that before because the entire thing was built in images.

Online or by email you have fewer than 10 seconds (or a lot less) to capture attention.

So short sharp, easy to read emails (whether in plain text or HTML) which you can read without manually downloading pictures are much more likely to get read and capture the attention of your customer in those vital few seconds.

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