As the online world changed from informational to commercial and highly competitive in the 1990s, marketers embraced new technology and the need to send graphically appealing newsletters and marketing messages arose. You only have a few seconds to grab attention and the right image grabs attention faster than the right copy, as the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Ask your clients if they would use plain white paper instead of letterhead to send an offline message to prospects and customers.
The vast majority of all email clients today can render (i.e. display) HTML emails relatively well. Notable exceptions are older versions of Lotus Notes and pre-6.0 AOL. So while a few years ago the answer to the question was quite complex, today it really depends on the purpose of the message, subscriber preferences and multi-part messages. Studies show that roughly 95 percent of commercial messages sent today are sent as Multi-Part MIME.
Multipart MIME is an older protocol that allows both text and HTML versions of an email to be sent in a single packet, sort of like a sandwich. The recipient's email program will then display the HTML version if they are able to read it, or the text version if they are not.
MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and is an Internet standard for email format. Virtually all human-written Internet e-mail, and a fair amount of automated e-mail, is transmitted via the 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 related to the SMTP and MIME standards that it is sometimes called SMTP/MIME e-mail.
Folks, while no one can agree on numbers and statistics, we can all agree on this: HTML email is not working properly for millions of recipients.
HTML email breaks in a wide variety of email inboxes. It's not because of your creative skills or ignorance of HTML - it's because the email client in which the recipient is viewing your email routinely corrupts your message.
I feel like it's worth defining because I know a lot of people get very scared when we talk about clients and servers, but they won't admit it. An e-mail client (some people also call it Mail User Agent) is nothing but a computer program used to read and send e-mails such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, etc. A mail server (also called a Mail Transfer Agent or MTA or mail exchange server) is a computer program that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another. Most of the time, since no one has time to learn all the acronyms and terminology created by the "big" people, we are used to knowing the mail server as all the cleverness (wires and all) that the program runs on.
Depending on the email system, your HTML images may be blocked so recipients will see a blank white box and/or your live links may not work properly. AOL 9.0, Outlook 2003, and Gmail are most notorious for blocking and/or breaking HTML "for security reasons".
Another big culprit for not letting HTML pass is Mel, a guy who works in the company's IT department. Many companies have IT departments that can't wait for the day when all attachments and all HTML emails are removed. That's because in their world, anything that isn't plain text is spam, viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, pure evil (ware) that keeps mailboxes growing and users snarling. As a result, most of those cubicle dwellers - end users - who have to sign a hundred-page policy before getting busy with these corporate e-mails, cannot view and/or send HTML messages, whether or not the feature is enabled. at the server level or on their computers.
Apart from everything else, there is no bigger offender here on earth than Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is notorious for refusing to work with multipart MIME like the rest of the civilized world.
For your amusement, here's a definition of Lotus Notes that was created by one of those "big" managers: "Lotus Notes is a commercial workflow and groupware software package that also provides application developers with an environment for rapidly creating cross-platform clients/clients." server applications". Still with me? do not worry. For the purposes of this article, Lotus Notes is an email client. OK?
If you work for a company that uses Lotus Notes as their email system, don't even think about sending newsletters from it in anything but text form. While as a general rule I always recommend that marketers use a professional permission-based email marketing service, with Lotus Notes you simply must.
If you are communicating with the B2B market, especially large professional services firms, large law firms, many Global 2000 companies, HTML email compatibility will be a pain in the ass, as many of these companies use Lotus Notes.
Problems include:
– Older versions of Lotus Notes (below R5) convert HTML emails to Lotus Notes Rich Text format. Versions of Lotus Notes below R5 also do not recognize Multi-Part MIME messages (HTML and text combined in one email).
– Some companies may deploy newer versions of the Lotus Notes client, ie R6, but use an older version of the Lotus Notes/Domino server, such as 4.6. In this example, the recipient's email client would also render the HTML message incorrectly.
Therefore, in order for the recipient to view the correctly rendered HTML e-mail, the company must use both a Lotus Notes client and a server version R5 and higher.
Here are some quick tips to take advantage of if you have a significant Lotus Notes subscriber base:
1. At the top of your HTML emails, put a link called "View Web Version" or something similar. The link sends the recipient to the HTML web version of the email (either the email technology provider's server or the sender's server).
2. Also include an "Update Preferences" link and provide a website update form that will then allow recipients to choose to receive text instead of HTML.
3. Create full text versions for those who don't want to receive HTML or can't display HTML.
4. In opt-in forms, include an option to receive a text version and possibly provide tips (ie "If you are using versions of Lotus Notes lower than R5, select Text").
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