html emails or old school attachments??

[Deland02]

I thought I'd open this one up for a discussion as I've not really seen any posts to help me out.

My company is planning a marketing campaign, part of the campaign is to mailshot 10,000 emails to existing & potential clients. We made some enquiries with various companies who specialise in this & we got conflicting information with regards to how the emails were going to be sent out. Some companies were saying to avoid html emails full stop as firewall's are stripping the content of the email. The solution to this would be to send an attached file with the advert on, a pdf or something similar. This seams to be a step back to the old school way in my opinion.

On the other hand different companies were saying the opposite.

I certainly thought that the html option would be the best. Set all the artwork up & publish this as a web page online (on the back of a micro site) & then link the email content to this.

Does anyone have any thoughts or knowledge on this one? Which way would be best? Or even if anyone knows some hard facts or figures about mail shot’s in general anything would be a great help.

[Loyx]

1. Use PHPmailer (http://phpmailer.codeworxtech.com/) or Pear Mail (http://pear.php.net/package/Mail) to send your html mail(I prefer the first one)

2. Add this SPF register (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework) to your DNS zone--> yourdomain.com. IN TXT "v=spf1 mx ptr ~all" (or the spam filters will eat your mails)

3. Do your mailing preferably at night time and always sending 100/200 at a time (stopping 15/20minutes)... You can make a PHP script to do this and setup a cronjob in your host to execute the script. Talk with your hosting company.

4. Use a seriuos email account. Like news@yourdomain.com

If you follow this: NO PROBLEM...

Your done... ;)

[ajcates]

have them check a box if they want html emails or not.

[Loyx]

Here you have 30 html+css mail templates working in hotmail, yahoo, outlook, thunderbird...

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/templates.aspx

When designing remember that you send a single html with only text and the css between the head tags. So in that html the path to your images have to be absolute:


<img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/img/pic.jpg" width=140 height=210 border=0 alt="My image">

You can store your images inside a folder in your server...

:bounce:

[rumblesushi]

I would have thought it would be far, far better to send an html email than a ****ing attachment.

Spammers often use attachments, and virii are often spread by PDFs so people are wary of them.

In companies I have worked for, attachments have often been blocked, but never HTML mails.

[Deland02]

Thanks for that everyone, I might try doing this in-house then which should save quite a bit of cash.