Despite today being the day we launch a Project Bubble HTML thank you email, and partly due to the fact that I’m being increasingly overwhelmed with the amount of HTML newsletters I have to design… I have to ask the question of whether the world (still) needs HTML emails?

Well… yes and no. It depends on what kind of HTML email you talk about.

In the instance of Project Bubble, we needed a way in which an email could serve as a quick reminder of the site (seeing as it’s not launched yet). A nicely designed HTML email did that trick quite nicely. It’s a free advert for the brand, and a quick reminder of the service. It met my objectives, it’s pretty unobtrusive, and it’s pretty expected, considering our users had just completed a form.

So an HTML email is fine, but what I do have a problem with is HTML newsletters. You know, those clunky, boring, overly-general ‘updates’ about companies’ going’s on. Why are companies bombarding people’s inboxes with messages, that we know most of the time just get deleted? More importantly - why are all of my clients still so hellbent on having them?

They’re yet another ill-concieved marketing project, aimed at increasing visitor volume through the medium of email. But what the marketing folks are forgetting is that they’re defying the very point of email, which is as Jeffrey Zeldman so elequently put it:

E-mail was invented so people could quickly exchange text messages over fast or slow or really slow connections, using simple, non-processor-intensive applications on any computing platform, or using phones, or hand-held devices, or almost anything else that can display text and permits typing.

Quickly exchange text messages! There’s nothing quick about an HTML newsletter… it’s lengthy and irrelevant - but still I see these things being sold to clients as a comodoty to any company with a mailing list.

Wouldn’t it be quicker, and probably more effective to go back to basics… and just send a quick email?

Subject: Hello!
Message: Hey Brian, it’s been a while since you subscribed to [company name] - fancy seeing what we’re up to? Just pop on down to www.[company].com.

Compared to an HTML equivalent, in this scenario the user probably wouldn’t have got passed the ‘Always/Never Display Images from this Sender’ before they blocked you in disgust! So it’s probably time we started advising against this pointless exercise, and found the real solution to problem. You want more visitors? No problems… there are plenty of other ways!

So there we go, HTML emails… acceptable. HTML newsletters… boooo!!

But as much as I hate to admit it - there is an acceptable time and place for HTML newsletters. I can think of one example, BabyCentre - where pregnant mothers/couples are able to subscribe to a newsletter during pregnancy. Each week they receive an HTML newsletter telling them what’s going on with their unborn child (i.e. It’s week 9! Your baby has a heartbeat…) Now that’s clever, relevant and useful… but still to be used with caution!

Ethics and etiquette aside, this is in part-response to Microsoft, who in their infinite wisdom decided last year to switch their rendering engine of Outlook to that of Word (a word processing software)! This has already led to terrible rendering of even the best designed and coded creations (original article here and the result here).

wanna say something?

If you've got an opinion about HTML Emails and Newsletters - then why not say something? You can even subscribe to these comments via RSS!

Name (required):

Email (required): Put a photo next to your comment!

Do what now?

To put a little photograph of yourself next to your comment, all you have to do is get a 'gravatar'. It's quick to setup, it's free and you can grab one here!

Website:

Comment: