Email advertisements and newsletters can be an effective way to communicate with customers and potential customers, and now businesses can choose between text-based or HTML email formatting options. When sending out email advertisements to customers and potential customers, it's important to keep in mind the wide variety of computer systems, networks and email programs. The most well-written and designed email advertisement will be useless if it's unable to reach your target audience: proper formatting and configuration is key.

When deciding whether to implement HTML or plain text formats for email marketing, consider that the way an email advertisement looks on your screen may not be representative of how it will look on other screens. In order to improve your ad's readability and response rate consider the following creating your email advertisements.

HTML Email Advertisements
HTML email advertisements offer text formatting capabilities and graphics, and allow businesses to create flashy and attractive ads. HTML allows a great deal of freedom in design, and allows users to format and layout your email as you might a newspaper or magazine advertisement. HTML emails work by encoding your message with information that is actually stored on the Internet. Therefore, if someone is offline when viewing your email, they may end up with broken links or blank text boxes.

Unfortunately, HTML email advertising's advanced design and formatting capabilities make it prone to viewing difficulties. Effectively deploying a HTML advertising campaign often requires some level of familiarity and experience with HTML programming and email interfaces, though it does offer several benefits.

Benefits of HTML:
• HTML advertisements allow businesses to track their email open rate, meaning you can track whether your email is opened or if it's deleted upon receipt.
• HTML ads can include images like company logos, product photos and other graphical enhancements.
• HTML ads provide formatting options such as boldface and underline, text alignment changes, and text and background color.
• You can include forms and other more complex HTML features with HTML ads.

Limitations of HTML:
• Employing too many graphics or images can distract readers from your message.
• Not everyone can view HTML ads properly. Only 50 to 75 percent of computer users have HTML capabilities.
• Images appear broken when you try to view the message offline
• Complex, image heavy ads take longer to load, which may frustrate and annoy potential customers.
• HTML ads are more easily recognized as “advertisements,” causing potential customers to tune it out.
• Ads require a background in HTML and graphics to be effectively deployed.

Text-based Email Advertisements
For email advertising beginners, it may make more sense to begin with a simple and cleanly designed text-based ad--especially if you are introducing your business to new and potential customers. Users can create text-based email advertisements in basic text editor programs. If you're running a PC system, Notepad is a great program for creating your ads. There are advantages and disadvantages to using text-based ads:

Benefits of Text-based Ads:
• Ads are easy to produce.
• Lack of graphics allow readers to focus on your copy.
• Text-based email advertisements can be read by most systems in the same way.
• Handheld email devices, such as BlackBerry's and some mobile phones, can easily read text-based emails.
Limitations of Text-based Ads:
• All hyperlinks must appear in their entirety. For example: http://www.yahoo.com. If you are directing readers to a particular product page, the hyperlink may be excessively long or complicated.
• Text-based ads don't allow users to hyperlink words
• You can't implement graphics into text-based emails, which means that your ad must stand on its wording alone.
• No font formatting such as underlining, boldface type, or color
• You can't track the open rate with text-based ads.

The Bottom Line
A well-written text-based message is easy to create and deploy, and can deliver results. Clean and well-designed HTML campaigns can also be very effective. But while HTML ads may seem like the more attractive option, consider the time, energy and skill required to create a dynamic HTML ad, and determine whether text-based ads may make more sense for your businesses email marketing needs.

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