Re: email marketing - software or service?

From: Cliff Kurtzman <moderator_at_o-a.com>
Date: Tue 20 Dec 2005 09:01:18 -0600

With the low volume you have to deliver, a hosted solution makes
sense.

We host our own mail server, but it is a pain to deal with
server maintenance, delivery issues, and a host of
other factors that just don't make sense to deal with
yourself unless your volume is high and you have in-house
technical resources. Unfortunately I don't have any specific
vendor to recommend to you... there are surely plenty out
there.

As far as using HTML mail goes, we've been using it for the
past year on our newsletters, and we have not seen a single
instance of the use of HTML affecting delivery. We have, on the
other hand, seen a huge increase in response rates as well
as volumes of explicit feedback praising enhanced professionalism
in the product. There was a time perhaps where the inclusion of
HTML would set off spam alert software, but I think HTML
mail is so common now that those days are long past.

There are, however, issues to consider when publishing HTML
mail that you don't have to deal with when doing straight
text publishing: you really need to test what you are sending
out with a variety of email clients with various degrees of
HTML compatibility... the same email that looks great
when viewed in Yahoo mail using a web browser may look
unreadable using Eudora. Don't embed graphics in the
email, but rather have them called from your web server
at the time the HTML is read and displayed by the reader.
In a university setting it probably isn't an issue, but
with some of our lists that reach a audience where some
of the readers are using very old software or very old
corporate email systems, it makes sense to publish both
a text and html version together in what is called a
"MIME content type multipart alternative" so those
readers that are only able to read text can get a text
version, while everyone else can see the HTML version.


--Cliff

Clifford R. Kurtzman
CEO | Moderator
ADASTRO Incorporated | The Online Advertising Discussion List
http://www.adastro.com | http://www.o-a.com
(281) 480-6300







Received on Tue Dec 20 2005 - 09:01:18 CST