Most of the marketing gurus tell us to send email format in text. Means the content will be displayed in simple text in your subscribers email clients.
In contrast, in html emails you can use images, colors, tables etc. to display the email content which can be very appealing to your subscribers eyes..
Recently I want to see how many people prefer text format and how many prefer html format. Did a small autoresponder experiment ... Details are here.
Note: Only the outline of the procedure is explained here. No personal details of any subscribers are revealed.
STEP 1:
I created an autoresponder where the visitor subscribes to get free ebooks. I copied the form code on one of my sites.
See the image? I want to tell you about couple of things that eliminates biased selection of format by the subscriber ...
1. Radiobuttons of BOTH formats are unselected. People tend to go with 'default' selection most of the times. So to let them click one radiobutton, both are left blank intentionally.
2. Both formats are presented by radiobuttons instead of dropdown to eliminate the chance of selecting the first format by the subscribers just because it is first and easily accessible.
3. Both radiobuttons are in same line. So subscriber can reach either one of them with same effort.
4. It has been stated clearly that all three fields need to be filled. This is to avoid frustration of the subscriber as he gets any error, it might alter the option of format as he clicks nearest radiobutton.
STEP 2:
The subscriptions are followed for 2 months. Details are as follows ...
Total subscribers - 281
Subscribers who opted for text 227 (80.78%)
Subscribers who opted for html 54 (19.22%)
What caused this drastic difference?
There certain myths(?) on why people don't prefer html emails to be delivered to their inboxes.
* Html emails are used by spammers: Spammers tend hide links to redirect the readers to a wrong site or wrong download link. Like as in the example of Paypal ... Sometimes people receive html emails exactly like emails sent by Paypal saying that your account was hacked, please login and check the account. Newbies tend to fall for this and click on the link in the email which redirect them to a fake Paypal site. They login with their details and those details are captured by spammers to hack your real Paypal account. Enough said ...
* Html emails caries viruses: Hackers send html emails with virus exe files attached. Ofcourse they use text emails too for this purpose, but html emails are more easily blammed for this.
* Subscribers like plain links: Subscripbers especially who are used to Internet marketing are like to see plain text and plain links rather than links hidden by html.
* Html emails takes up more inbox space: Because of the attached images and html code, html emails tend to occupy more space in subscribers inbox. So subscribers who have the idea of this inbox space, they tend to go for text emails.
But there are certain percentage of subscribers who like to see html, I guess. That is why 54 out of 227 are opted for html emails.
You as an Email marketer, have THREE options:
* Either go with Text format emails as most of the subscribers will be pretty happy with text format.
* Or offer both formats as an option to select for your subscribers.
* Send MIME email messages.
Any drawbacks to this study?
This is very short 2 months study. So there might be little difference of values if study is done with large group which can alter the results either way ... But as overall I think we can see a trend towards text emails.
