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Designing a modern email
- na85 13y agoPerhaps a more fitting title would be "designing a modern spam message"? Those emails are exactly the kind of emails that I never read.
- toki5 13y agoThere's a large difference in my mind between a newsletter a company only sends out to its subscribers and unsolicited e-mail advertisements.
- coolsunglasses 13y agoIt's called BACN.
- m_d 13y agoWhile you may never read them, a surprising number of people do. I had an internship where my primary responsibility was composing HTML emails that went out to users on a weekly basis. If I remember correctly, the majority of our users opened the emails, and roughly 5-10% clicked on a link to content on the site. I imagine these number vary quite a bit, but for a site with a paid membership we saw a lot of traffic from HTML newsletters.
- Demiurge 13y agoYes, spam is a profitable business, that's probably why there is so much more of it than personal email.
- m_d 13y agoI don't see how opt-in messages from a paid service qualify as spam.
- Demiurge 13y agoI get a lot of opt-in messages that I didn't really opt-in for, as does everyone. How many people do you think even know what 'opt-in' is ?
- snowwrestler 13y agoDo you get any email you did really opt-in for? If so, just think of those.
- Demiurge 13y agoNo, I don't receive any mass-delivered email that opted-in for, because if I wanted to read something generic I would go to the relevant website or blog. I do, of course, receive some 'group email' which is equally relevant to all the recipients, but the sender obviously had all of us, recipients, in mind when writing the email. And I'm not even opposed to mass-emails, it's just obvious that for the most part these emails are not relevant to the recipients, and adding any styling to these advertisements isn't making them any more relevant or useful.
- mlnhd 13y agoI frequently receive marketing emails from sites I never opted into. Either the site didn't provide a choice to opt-in or opt-out on the same form where I provided my e-mail address or they ignored my preference.
- jff 13y agoUsually "opting in" consists of daring to purchase something from a company, who will then send you weekly "deals" emails.
- eli 13y agoIndeed, many people enjoy reading content in their email client and prefer it over other delivery mechanisms. (Some people live in their email client.)
- snowwrestler 13y agoIt's not spam if you sign up for it and want to get it. But even wanted emails need good design to be effective.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- acuozzo 13y agoNobody wants to receive e-mails like this.
- dsabanin 13y agoWell if people read them and click on the links from these emails, then you must be wrong. Surprise! Did you even read the post? If you don't want them, it doesn't mean nobody does. There's also an unsubscribe link at the bottom.
- 3825 13y agoI am surprised at how I randomly go to my spam email address once a few months and end up interacting with services that I thought I would never go back to It is like they get a second chance for sending me emails and not giving up on me.
- acuozzo 13y agoYes, I read the entire post from beginning to end. I still wholeheartedly believe that nobody wants e-mails like this. Yes, I'm speaking in absolutes and yes, I don't give a damn. > If you don't want them, it doesn't mean nobody does. Correct. I chose to speak in absolutes to make a point. > There's also an unsubscribe link at the bottom. That's wonderful, but I'm pretty sure the terminal emulator I'm running Alpine in doesn't do automatic URL lexing... HTML is for the WWW. Please keep it out of e-mail. Thanks.
- nivla 13y agoCurious, without HTML do you expect everyone to copy-paste confirmation and password reset links? How do you account for broken links due to message truncate or unicode rendering? What about aligning various sections of the message? Controlling the font size of header, body and footer? HTML has as much history in emails as it does in the web. Taking HTML out of email is as hard as trying to take the Smart Phone out of phones today.
- acuozzo 13y ago
- B5geek 13y agoHtml in email is bad.evil.wrong.stupid. When will these people get it?
- 3825 13y agoI like plain text as well but I dislike the fact that it looks so ugly. Why do we need to insert line break at 72 (or something) characters? Can't we wrap text emails?
- aidenn0 13y agoThere's an RFC that nobody uses for rich-text e-mails. [edit] found it! http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1523 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1523
- 3825 13y agoPerhaps I need to think about what I don't like about html-formatted emails. I can't really put my finger on anything. I am not against html when I think about it. It just feels like it is not the right tool for the job. (I know I am doing a pretty poor job at explaining myself. Sorry!)
- aidenn0 13y agoI don't like them either, for the exact same reason!
- mjn 13y agoThunderbird wraps plaintext emails by default.
- dsabanin 13y agoStill using mutt, huh?
- Demiurge 13y agoHe's probably still using email for communication and not free mass media content delivery.
- Demiurge 13y agoModern email should be completely banning any markup but spaces, going to UTF-8-32 encoding. Maaaybe increasing the maximum column width from 80 to 120, but that's stretching it (hehe).
- aresant 13y agoI want to underline one change they made that in my experience makes a huge impact: GET RID OF THE HEADER / LOGO This is one of the basic steps that I've seen drive conversion almost every time be it ecommerce checkout / lead gen / email / etc. The header distracts from your content, eliminate it or limit it as much as possible, especially when you have somebody that's already engaged (somebody added to cart, joined your list, etc). In email they did exactly the right thing - center the user on the brand w/the "from address" or the title vs. wasting pixels in your content. Several years ago I wrote about including company name in the email title as an "Always" winner for email: http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/optimize-your-email-conversion-rate-with-3-quick-tips/ http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/optimize-your-e...
- jhammer 13y agoI'm one of the developers for the Direct Mail app mentioned in the article. Would be happy to answer any questions. Thanks for the interesting post!
- Jgrubb 13y agoI'd never heard of it, but just gave it a spin and it's really impressive. I work for a decent sized publishing co that sends a lot of email newsletters as part of it's core biz. I know this e3 thing is part of your service, but is there any planned integration with something like Exact Target (via API, not just SMTP)? Thanks!
- jhammer 13y agoThanks! We have additional integrations planned, but if you have something in particular in mind, please drop me (Jonathan) a note: http://directmailmac.com/support http://directmailmac.com/support. Thanks for the feedback!
- joshuahedlund 13y ago> 79% of your readers spent longer than 2+ seconds looking at your email I understand how opened emails can be tracked without javascript, via server hits to img files, but what magic allows you to track how long it was opened?
- jmharvey 13y agoIf the goal is to make an email feel like it's written by a human being, why not emulate what human emails actually look like? Does the author photo actually make it feel more human, or less? I can't think of a time I've ever gotten a real-person email that included a picture of the sender.
- efedorenko 13y agoBecause this would be a lie. We don't try to fool our users by sending them fake personal emails - who would believe that CEO actually emails every new user? But we want to show that there is a really small team behind the product, and you can get in touch with anyone just by replying to email. Every reply goes directly to the person who wrote email, not a support inbox.
- joshuacc 13y agoAnd once again, the anti-HTML zealots are out in force, declaring that just because they don't like HTML email, no one else should be permitted to receive HTML email. A counterpoint: I subscribe to several HTML newsletters, and the fact that they are in HTML is a huge advantage to me. It means that JavaScript Weekly (Peter Cooper's newsletter) isn't just a mass of URLs. And it means that I can quickly preview the newest fonts from FontShop without having to visit their site. You may not like HTML email, but it has tangible benefits to many of us.
- FireBeyond 13y agoKinda impressive how many zealots, near-luddites HN has - I think some of the opinions on this topic are more passionate than OS or editor wars.
- subsection1h 13y agoKinda impressive how many zealots, near-luddites HN Disliking HTML email makes someone a near-Luddite?
- FireBeyond 13y agoNo - not at all, but making absolutist claims about it, and about how no-one should have to "endure" it, does - and there are multiple comments of that nature in this thread.
- Groxx 13y agoOr just send multipart emails. Best of both worlds (except bandwidth).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- systematical 13y agoSide note, anyone remember Google Wave?