> The only problem with sending an entirely plain text email > is when you get into the world of stats.
Well, that's a marketer's problem, and as an end user I don't care, I want information in a way I can use it. For the past eight years, the FNAC in France has cheerfully sent me a fat rich HTML newsletter every week which I can't read, and their so-called "feedback" doesn't function; every year I ask them for a plaintext version, every year I get no response. I'd like to see their data report that shows a loyal customer having spent over 22K roros these past fifteen years (including online purchases with plain text e-mail communication option) who doesn't bounce their marketing e-mails, yet never "reads" them nor "clicks" on them. I'm sure such a report doesn't include the messages I take the time to type & send them. I work for a big company and in the past managed hosting for a few dozen websites which included e-mail marketing. Invariably, low clickthrough rates were related to unreadable messages. We sent lots of plain text e-mails with "click here for rich version" URLs, occasionally personalized. Although there was lots of talk about targeting and personalization, we had the most success when we merely concentrated on getting people to the site, then analysed the site visit data. Nontechnical anecdotal studies (focus groups) found that many e-mails were forwarded to friends & family, which of course would render any analysis of personalized URLs useless. On the other hand, watching generally which portions of the site had high visit rates immediately following e-mail campaigns was fruitful and far simpler to compile & report & communicate internally. Product launches had TVC, print, OOH, and POS support too, so really all we had to do was to try to find a correlation between a newsletter and increased traffic. One of my successors told me about a curious case: a visit spike which correlated to an e-mail, but coming from another country; it turned out an influential blogger had gotten the e-mail and cut & pasted an e-mail link onto her blog. Sean. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
