Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

HTML has more pizzazz and sex appeal. Text-only is simple and straight to the point. Which has better pulling power when getting across a message to customers? You may not like the answer, as Simon van Wyk writes.

As computer and modem speeds and broadband use increase, online marketers have become more and more enthusiastic about using full-colour, Flash-driven HTML in email newsletters and interactive direct marketing, instead of boring, text-only messages. After all, why drink cask wine when you can have Veuve Clicquot or Grange Hermitage?

Perhaps because your customers have an acquired taste for cask wine.

A recent survey by research group Opt-In News said 62% of consumers globally prefer plain text as the format for email ads. HTML, with web page-style quality of text and images, was preferred by 35% of respondents, while the higher bandwidth required by rich media is probably the reason that only 3% of respondents call that their preferred format.

However, this is the opposite of what marketers are actually doing. Opt-In News data from last year reported US marketers use HTML 60% of the time, with plain text coming in at 34%. This is confirmed by a survey by the Association for Interactive Marketing, which asked its member companies that conduct email campaigns to nominate which email format they use. Only 30% used text only, while 70% used some kind of HTML and/or rich media.

Don’t slow me down

The attraction of HTML ads and newsletters to marketers is obvious. If you’re sending out newsletters to support branding and direct response goals, HTML formatting lets you include your logo and pictures of your product. You can also vary fonts and colours and use bolding, italics, etc. to make your newsletter more eye-catching and readable.

But consumer preferences for text-only emails are backed up by their actions. A survey by IMT Strategies from late last year revealed that text-only emails have 20% higher click-through rates and nearly twice the conversion rates of HTML emails, with a lower bounce rate and only one-third the unsubscribe rate.

As David Hallerman writes in eMarketer, “Consumers tend to dislike HTML (and its rich media offspring) because those larger emails tend to clog their inboxes and download slower. In addition, HTML emails more and more look like spam.”

Heidi Anderson writes on the Clickz website that “If you’re considering an email marketing campaign of your own, don’t believe what everyone will tell you: that HTML always outperforms text. Don’t stake your career on it. Consider your options. And your audience.”

Newsletter emotions

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen has recently weighed into the email debate, releasing a major report on the usability of email newsletters. He reports that the most significant finding from his study is that users have “highly emotional reactions” to newsletters.

This, he says, is “in strong contrast” to all of his website usability studies, where users are usually much more oriented towards functionality. “Even a website that you visit daily will feel like a tool where you want to get in and get out as quickly as possible and not connect with the site,” he says.

However, newsletters “feel personal because they arrive in your inbox; you have an ongoing relationship with them.

“The positive emotional aspect of newsletters is that they can create much more of a bond between user and company than a website can. The negative aspect is that usability problems have much stronger impact on the customer relationship than they normally do,” according to Nielsen.

In his typical colourful language, Nielsen says the differences between Web browsing platforms “are like those between Indian and African elephants and not like the differences between crabs and eagles.

“In contrast, email newsletters have to contend with platform diversity that is much more like the biodiversity of the Cretaceous Period (before the comet hit)…. Each email platform has a different way of displaying the From line, the Subject line, and the content of a newsletter, as well as different approaches to spam filtering and other ways of influencing the user experience of the newsletter subscriber.

“This diversity makes it very important for newsletter designers to consider the many different platforms and test their subscribe and unsubscribe processes as well as the delivery and display of the actual newsletter on all major email platforms.”

While Nielsen doesn’t go so far as to say using HTML is bad, he does advise that newsletters be designed to facilitate scanning, because people get so much email. Bad newsletters take too much time or demand too much work of the user, while good newsletters cut down the time it takes users to accomplish something.

The only newsletter in Nielsen’s study that was consistently read every time it was received was Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day, “which is very short and also has an engaging layout that doesn’t intimidate users with a wall of text.”

Nielsen says, “It is the job of the newsletter publisher to convince users that the newsletter will be simple, useful, and easy to deal with. ”

A bet each way

But don’t throw out your HTML emails just yet. A lot of debate has taken place on the HTML vs. text-only format question, and almost all commentators agree on one thing: if you’re asking whether HTML or text-only is the one to use, you’re asking the wrong question.

Hallerman writes in eMarketer, “The question remains why a marketer would want to employ one e-mail format over another-or even if the marketer needs to make such a choice.”

Jeanne Jennings, writing in Clickz, tells marketers, “Text or HTML? The short answer is both. You should offer your email newsletter in both formats. Let recipients choose which they want to receive.”

Hallerman concludes, “Marketers should always offer readers the choice between text-only and HTML e-mails. And even the HTML e-mails need to be carefully crafted (from a tech side), since not all e-mail software reads HTML e-mails alike. Making such distinctions means more work, but the traps avoided can mean the difference between e-mail fiasco and e-mail success.”