Lately, we’ve converted several of our clients’ print advertisements into HTML e-mails. It’s an effective and relatively inexpensive way (if you have a set of existing ads) of utilizing a widely used communications medium in order to promote your brand or service. A major advantage of an HTML e-mail is that it’s much faster, efficient and visually appealing in delivering your message when compared to traditional e-mail methods.

As an example, let’s say that we have a service announcement to make to our existing client base. With traditional e-mail, we can do this in one of several ways.

One method would be to actually write about the service announcement in the body of the e-mail, which makes it a relatively simple, but an uninspiring way of communicating your message. It’s hard to capture a reader’s attention with a simple text message, and if this message consists of several paragraphs of copy it becomes even less effective.

The other method would be to write up the announcement, and send it out as an attachment to the e-mail. While people e-mail millions of attachments every day, because of security concerns, some recipients may be weary of opening attachments especially when they come from people that they’ve had limited contact with. Some IT departments go so far as actually stripping the attachment from the e-mail before it arrives at its intended destination. Recipients may also not have the correct application installed in order to open the e-mail.

With an HTML e-mail, you can effectively tackle all the shortcomings of delivering your message via regular e-mail. By embedding your advertisement as an image, or a mini HTML web page, you instantly deliver a visually rich message, that the recipient can see instantly, and doesn’t have to do any additional clicking, or open up any other applications, in order to view your message. As a bonus, you can also track the amount of times your e-mail has been viewed by the recipient using your servers statistics software, or via Google Analytics integration, because all of the images that are within the e-mail are hosted on your server.

Now, unless you have a lot of experience in the design and implementation of HTML e-mails, it’s best if you start off with an existing pre-designed template. If you’re going to wing it on your own, SitePoint’s guide of How to Code HTML e-mail newsletters is a good place to start. If you don’t have time to do any of these two options, contact us to see how we can help with your HTML eMarketing campaign.