Seeing advice to the tune of "don't do it because it's bad!" causes my Hacker sense to sound off alarms. I have to tell myself "You are not the average user!" three times a day, and I'm just making stupid Facebook games.
HTML email is absolutely something you should test. Take 10% of your email list and hit them with an HTML-ized version of your marketing email. How did they respond? Did they buy more or less? Did they unsubscribe?
Asking "Do people want an HTML email?" is the wrong question. Asking "Do people spend more from an HTML email?" is the right question. Anything less from a startup is leaving money on the table.
I have to tell myself "You are not the average user!" three times a day
Exactly. I generate an awful lot of HTML email - it goes to people who want to open their Outlook in the morning and have a bunch of stuff summarized in graphs and tables. It's trivial to generate reports this way. Weirdly some people prefer their reports as an email saying "please see attached report" and the content itself in a PDF! That's easy enough too tho' shrug
Just beware blackberry users. Their email clients suck donkey dong. Some newer clients can handle basic html formatting (tables et.al.) though they still can't wrap text in a pleasing way.
I got burned by this earlier in the year when I made the mistake of assuming business people would be able to read html-formatted email (and they were all on BB)
The old chestnut about "assume" making an "ass of you and me" is true :-(
HTML email is absolutely something you should test. Take 10% of your email list and hit them with an HTML-ized version of your marketing email. How did they respond? Did they buy more or less? Did they unsubscribe?
Asking "Do people want an HTML email?" is the wrong question. Asking "Do people spend more from an HTML email?" is the right question. Anything less from a startup is leaving money on the table.