Html Email

HTML email is email that contains rich graphics, picture, images and even videos, and are composed to look much like an HTML website.  HTML stands for HyperText  Markup Language and is the predominant language for web pages.  With this in mind, you can expect HTML emails to be colorful, creative, and attractive to the readers.  Wikipedia describes HTML emails as “the use of subset HTML (often ill-defined) to provide formatting and semantic mark-up capabilities in email that are not available in plain text.”

One of the biggest advantage of HTML emails over plain text emails is that there is a large percentage of subscribers who prefer HTML emails over plain text emails.  Surveys show that people prefer HTML email for a variety of reasons and some of these reasons include: HTML email newsletters can accomplish a more effective layout, colors can be used, images can be included, and ads are more effective with HTML emails than text emails.

Basically, subscribers prefer HTML emails simply because they are more attractive than text emails and email marketers prefer it because they can be creative with the body of their email and it translates to a higher open rate and in turn, higher positive responses to their email marketing campaign. Opt-out or unsubscribe rates are also much lower in HTML email compared to text emails.  Simply said, HTML emails appear to be more effective over its plain text counterpart

If there are advantages of HTML email, it also has its disadvantages.  One of the more obvious disadvantage of HTML email on the email marketer’s end is that it can be a bit more complicated to make than plain text versions.  It has a learning curve and marketers should commission the help of experts in composing their emails or choose an online service which has a corresponding cost.  In other words, HTML emails are more expensive to make than plain text emails.  Another disadvantage is that HTML emails are prone to encounter compatibility issues and have problems with rendering consistently across platforms and software.  These compatibility issues will cause your HTML email to not work properly and end up with broken links, images that will not open or are missing, and just render your emails useless.

For recipients, HTML emails can cause a host of other problems as well. These emails contain executable codes and opening them would mean that your computer is executing dozens of unknown programs daily – some that could be harmful to your computer. Hackers also prefer to send HTML emails as they can easily hide viruses and other malicious codes behind what appears to be harmless clickable links.

For these reasons, there are people who consider HTML messages to be dangerous and would set up their spam filters to reject these kinds of messages or they would prefer to just receive plain text messages.

In conclusion, HTML email has its advantages and disadvantages.  It is the choice of the email marketer to weigh their options and to choose what is most advantageous for their email marketing campaign.  As a subscriber, you should also be presented with a choice to either receive HTML or just text emails.