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. Notable exceptions are
older versions of Lotus Notes and pre AOL pre version 6.0. So
whereas a few years ago the answer to the question was rather
complex, today 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 e-mail is 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.
Folks, 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 isn't
due to your creative abilities or lack of HTML knowledge - it's
due to the fact that the email client your recipient views your
email in routinely breaks your message.
I feel like this is worth defining, as I know a lot of people
get very scared when we talk about clients and servers, but will
not admit it. An email client (some "big picture" people also
call it Mail User Agent) is nothing but a computer program that
is used to read and send e-mail, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes,
Thunderbird, etc. 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, we are 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."
Another big offender for not letting HTML through is Mel, the
guy that works in the corporate IT department. 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 policy 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.
Everything else aside, there is no bigger offender here on Earth
than Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is notorious for its refusal to
handle Multi-Part MIME the same way the rest of the civilized
world does.
For your amusement, here is a definition of Lotus Notes that was
created by one of those "big picture" executives: "Lotus Notes
is a commercial workflow and groupware software package that
also provides application developers an environment for quickly
creating cross- platform client/server applications." Still with
me? Don't be scared. For the purposes of this article, Lotus
Notes is an email client. Ok?
If you work for a company that uses Lotus Notes as the email
system, don't even think about sending newsletters other than in
text form from it. Besides the fact that as a general rule, I
always recommend to marketers the use of a professional
permission based email marketing service, in the Lotus Notes
case you just have to.
If you communicate to the B2B market, particularly large
professional services firms, large lawfirms, 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:
- Older versions of Lotus Notes (under R5) convert HTML emails
to a Lotus Notes Rich Text format. Lotus Notes versions under R5
also do not recognize Multi-Part MIME messages (HTML and text
combined in a single email).
- Some companies may be deploying later versions of the Lotus
Notes client, i.e., R6, but using an older version of Lotus
Notes/Domino server such as 4.6. In this example, the
recipient's email client would also render an HTML message
incorrectly.
So for a recipient to view a properly rendered HTML email, a
company must use both the Lotus Notes client and server of R5
and above.
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 then 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").
In conclusion, I will say it again: Folks, don't try this at
home. Instead, always outsource email marketing to one of the
many professional services. Advantages are: No blacklists and
established relations with the major ISPs, ensuring maximum
deliverability (plus, you don't want to be called a spammer and
banned from everywhere). They also make it easy to create, send,
and track permission-based email, have advanced reporting,
message scheduling, the ability to create unlimited lists,
bounce back handling (extremely important), subscription
management, newsletter templates and many other major
industry-standard features. The service I use for my company can
be tried free for 15 days, here:
http://www.bsleek.com/emailmarketing/
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