[thelist] Newsletter as HTML Email

Max Schwanekamp lists at neptunewebworks.com
Thu Feb 1 11:16:12 CST 2007


I wrote:
> Further, why is it that nearly all major organizations (commercial and 
> otherwise) use HTML email for marketing purposes?

Steven Streight wrote:
> The "major organizations" reasoning falls a bit flat to my ears, no offense.
> User observation testing is still rather less than universally done. I'm
> actually trying to sort of pioneer the usabilty testing of APIs, for
> instance.

My question sounded purely rhetorical, but I didn't mean it that way -- 
It's a real question.  If HTML email is such a bad idea, is not 
effective, etc., then why do so many big players continue to use it?

To my mind, the best communicator I've found among "bigger" companies is 
Sitepoint.  They use both HTML newsletters (with a plain-text option) 
and RSS.  The two avenues do not do the same thing, but they accomplish 
much the same thing -- communicating about stuff going on at 
Sitepoint.com, and (being a commercial site) drawing people to browse to 
the site.

-- 
Max Schwanekamp
NeptuneWebworks.com
541-255-2171




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