That being said, many marketers are still not keen to publish in html. The reason: there are many problems associated with HTML emails that can actually hurt, rather than aid your marketing campaign. So let’s make a list of how HTML can be hurtful to your marketing efforts.

1.Different email clients work differently

Internet Explorer (IE) is dominant Web browsers used by most web surfers, so when it comes to designing websites, as long as site presents well in IE, chances are, most visitors to your site can view it properly.

Unfortunately, equation becomes more complicated if we are talking about emails since there are different types of email clients (eg., Outlook Express, Eudora, web-based email clients and so on), each with different capabilities, settings, versions, etc. that make it more difficult to predict how your email will look like at recipients’ end. Generally speaking, capabilities of web-based email clients such as Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo! Mail are not as robust as program-based email clients, so certain effects that appear all right in program-based clients may not show properly in web-based clients. Another example is how some web-based clients cause your re-directs on URL to break or appear as plain text making it such that links that are crucial to making sales do not work. The worst blunder happens when your recipient receives a marketing message that they can’t read at all. This is case with some email clients such as Pine that don’t have capability to read HTML or AOL that can’t display HTML properly. Consider also problem your recipients will encounter if they use PDA and Internet-capable cellular phone. These devices don’t support HTML email at all.

2.The problem with printing HTML emails

Some of your recipients like to print their emails and read them offline for a variety of reasons. The danger of this to your marketing message is that graphical components in your HTML email may appear as blank boxes with icons indicating that graphics should be there, but are unfortunately not there. When such blank boxes appear, you are kissing goodbye to hope that your graphical HTML email will present a professional image to your recipients. Instead of looking disjointed and untidy with blank boxes, your message will have a greater impact if it has no frills (i.e., plain text), but is presented in a properly formatted way.

3.Connecting your users to Internet when they don’t intend that

To inform customers about offers, discounts and like

To send updated information on a company¡¦s products and services

To send free informative articles and write-ups to maintain contact and build customer loyalty.

Email marketing strategies of future are set to undergo a dramatic change and much of this can be attributed to software advances in email marketing tools. Before we understand how, we need to first put in perspective key issues in any email marketing program.

Who do you target: Identifying Your prospects

How often: The frequency with which you email them

What will you say to them: email content

Tracking results

Indications are that software advances will positively impact all these aspects of email marketing.

The impact of software advances on email marketing trends

Rising to demands of business users, service providers offer improved features and advanced email-marketing capabilities. The advanced capabilities have been studied for each of 4 key issues in email marketing outlined above:

Who do you target: Identifying your prospects

—Targeting messages by segments using advanced database and search options: You can vary messages by geographic area, by purchase history, and if available in your opt-in list- by demographics and lifestyle. Software features allow you to easily identify specific type of customers for customized promotions. You can mail customers who purchased Product "XYZ" a complementary offer for a new Product. —List Management & Filtering Tools to organize your Opt-in lists, you can also merge more than one opt-in lists and duplicated addresses get automatically removed.

How often: The frequency with which you email them

You will be able to fix precise month, week, day, and even hour that email messages go out to prospects. You can schedule exact dates for an autoresponder series

What will you say to them: email content?

Email content is developing into ¡§made of internet¡¨ material as writers become savvier with this medium