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Ask YC: HTML emails or not?

3 points by jamongkad ↗ HN
Hey guys my company plans to send emails marketing our app to our target audience. My question is do we use html emails or just plain text emails?

[edit]

Perhaps I should have been more specific. I just want a way to help push awareness of our product in addition to Google ads / internet forum advertising. It is not my intention to appear scammy/spammy, that is why I wanted to seek the advice of fellow YC'ers who have been in the trenches so to speak on how to effectively market their software.

12 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 40.0 ms ] thread
cperciva
my company plans to send emails marketing our app to our target audience

Please send them in HTML. That way my email filters will discard them automatically and I'll never have to read your spam.

jamongkad
Hmmm it wasn't my intention to spam. But I guess HTML email is out of the question then.
Dilpil
Make sure to include gibberish to bypass the spam filters.
jjguy
plain text. I don't read HTML emails.
brk
The kind of people who are generally receptive to that kind of approach seem to prefer HTML emails, IME.
jamongkad
Hmmm perhaps you're right but again I don't want to come off as spammy/scammy. I just want to help push our product in a informative manner.
mixmax
Looking at the comments here you should remember who the people here are (hackers) and who your audience is.

If your audience is hackers the advice here is good, if it isn't you should probably look elsewhere to back up the your choice. For most people the only distinction between HTML and plain text emails is that the plain text email looks boring and doesn't have clickable links, meaning that you can't click through to a webpage. Copy-pasting a link is still for the geeks.

jamongkad
Well my target audience is advertising companies. But point well taken.
answerly
Email is actually a pretty poor new customer acquisition tool for all the reasons spelled out by previous commenters. The best use of email, in my experience, is to keep existing users engaged and informed about your company/product.

To answer your original question, we send user emails in HTML so that we can include light branding elements (logo, etc), but design them in such a way that they look like text emails. That is, we don't go overboard with images and tables (most webmail clients default to images off anyway). You will also want to create a text alternative for those precipitants that can't receive HTML.

jaxn
This is not an either or. Use the proper MIME types and send a HTML version and a plain text version in the same message.

HTML email is one of those things that some people get religious about.

ideamonk
Hi,we are working on shopping cart at www.bestdealaz.com, when implementing the "tell a friend" feature, I had done it with plan text mails. and one interesting find was that none of them crossed gmail's spam filter. we switched to table based good looking html mails with inline styling... and something nice happened... none of the mails get into spam folder now! all straight in the inbox. So, i guess this will of some help around here :)