No more fancy HTML emails. Please!
A pet peeve of mine is all these over-designed HTML e-mails I get.
They’re simply not an efficient way to convey information.
An HTML e-mail has the following drawbacks
- Most e-mail clients don’t load the images without the user’s consent. So not only is the visual design gone. The message is also preceded by a warning message “To help protect your privacy, some content in this message has been blocked. If you are sure that this message is from a trusted sender and you want to re-enable the blocked features, click here.“Quite an introduction, yes?
- It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to read on my iPhone, and pretty much any handheld device. So it goes straight into the trash.
- Printing it usually produces a very poor result.
- If it has a dark background and I forward it to my friends, the text I write will be barely visible, since my text is usually black by default.
- Since the first impression is that it looks like an ad, many people will hit the delete button without even reading the headline.
- The body text, containing the actual message is often not in focus, since visual attention is drawn to all the decorative graphics.
And the following advantages
- The people who send them think they look nice.
And another thing, if your email needs to be prefaced with with “If you are having difficulty viewing this email, please read click here.” then you need to find a better format.
It’s definitely not a new idea, but it’s not utilized often enough.