[Sigia-l] Images in HTML newsletters

[John McCrory]

Martijn,

As has been said on recent threads, it's what the client wants that counts,
and your client wants images of their new car in the e-mail. A problem
arises when the medium by which your client intends to communicate with its
customers -- e-mail -- isn't purely in the control of the sender. The
variety of e-mail agents and their idiosyncratic methods for rendering HTML
e-mail, along with the user controls which vary from mail agent to mail
agent, create a situation that is similar to the problem of ensuring web
pages look the way you intend on many different platforms and browsers.
Since the variety of different e-mail agents -- and versions of those agents
-- is greater than that of the web, where despite inroads by Firefox,
Netscape, and other web browsing agents, IE6 is still used by a significant
majority of users in most audiences, one cannot design e-mail for a
most-common-denominator e-mail agent and expect that a significant majority
of recipients will see the e-mail as you hope them to.

A lot of critiques of HTML e-mail have been written that suggest HTML e-mail
is "evil"; As with so many areas of technology, there are partisans who hate
it with near religious passion. But this view is mainly held by
technologists; I've yet to meet a client who wanted to send e-mail to her or
his customers who felt this way. Rather, they want the e-mail they send to
their customers to be an attractive representation of their brand and they
are not aware how difficult it is to make that happen consistently because
they don't understand the limitations of e-mail technology.

I've had to deal with this situation at my organization and it stinks to be
in the position of saying to my 'customers' "Sorry, it's not so easy to do
that." I am not telling them it's impossible, but I am telling them that it
is a lot more expensive than they may have imagined.

When we began offering e-mail newsletters in both HTML and plain-text format
about 18 months ago, I did a test, allowing the users to choose the format
they preferred when they signed up. A script in the signup form alternated
the order of these options so that half saw a form with HTML listed as the
first option and half saw a form with plain-text as the first option. Each
option was explained. I found that over the course of several months, 97% of
users consistently chose HTML e-mail. Those results surprised the heck out
of me. Since we are a nonprofit with limited funds, When we built a custom
e-mail content management system to send the e-mail automatically, we made
the hard choice to switch to only sending HTML e-mail because it didn't make
sense to spend several thousand more dollars to support barely 100
subscribers (out of 3,000) -- most of whom turned out to be happy with HTML
e-mail after all. I've gotten a single complaint, and that person was
satisfied when shown how to view the e-mail on the web as an alternative.

Nevertheless, I still deal with from 2 to 5 cases a month where our HTML
e-mails are rejected as spam, and I've found it difficult to do much about
that. But it has not proved worth the cost to worry about those 2 to 5
cases.

As for the images issue, it is possible to design an HTML e-mail that still
looks attractive with the images off. The key, I have found is to use the
ALT tags and not get too creative with your HTML and styles. 

(Artisanal, the fine cheese restaurant and distributor in New York City,
www.ArtisinalCheese.com , does e-mail newsletters that I believe look quite
nice with images off and is very nice with them on.) 

Without images, it may not be as rich an experience for the user, but a) you
can't really control that, and b) that's what your web site is for. And
ultimately you want the recipient of the e-mail to click through to the web
site. That's also a better measure of your e-mail's success; I'd argue it's
better and a more accurate measure to track hits on your site that come from
your e-mail newsletters than to track how many folks open the e-mail by
using some image-bug.

Hope this helps you with your problem,

John

     John McCrory, Webmaster 
     Vera Institute of Justice

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Welie, Martijn van
Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2005 6:25 AM
To: Sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Images in HTML newsletters


Hi,

We're having an internal debate about how to deal with images in HTML
newsletters.
Most newsletters that I personally receive fetch the images from the server.
The email only contains the HTML.

However, with most new email clients such as Outlook2003 and Thunderbird,
the images are not automatically loaded. Therefore the HTML is rendered
without images and looks crappy. Users get a message that some images have
not been loaded but I wonder how many people actually see it and choose to
download the images.

So alternatively, we could embed all the images in the email message so that
we know for sure that the newsletter looks decent for all people. Our client
is of course very worried about the looks of the newsletter.

But if you want to do some measurements regarding the opening of email, you
need to embed an image that must be loaded from a server, otherwise you
cannot measure.

So is the ideal option to pack all images in the mail itself except for the
one that is used for measurements?
The side-effect of this is that people with the new email clients will see a
goodlooking newsletter but they will not load the measurement image unless
they actively click on the 'download images' message....and see nothing
change...;-)

Does anybody similar experiences?

Regards,

Martijn
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