The marketing email is the interface between you and those you are trying to reach. It is the way you will be judged, at least initially. Even if it does connect with them it is only conditional and whether they actually buy or follow through on whatever it is you are offering depends on the product. If they are put off by the email then it is the end of the process.

With the email being so important you will want full control over the creative process so you might wonder why those companies which supply email marketing software provide a choice of templates.

In all sales the way the customer behaves is one limiting factor but for email marketing there is the additional restriction of the constraints of the technology. And just to make things extra interesting, these vary with time, and at an increasingly rapid rate.

Thankfully there is little requirement to know the technical details the various systems or the jargon. There is no real way to avoid HTML: hyper text mark-up language. HTML has been defined in many ways but it is simply a method to define how a document will be displayed in a web browser. It does this by the use of tags, instructions carried between the signs < and >.

You would think that, as it is a standard format, it would be the preferred option for marketing emails but this would be too simple.

Two factors limit the effectiveness of HTML: new technology and the limitations, often chosen, of web-based email readers.

Customers are increasingly using PDAs and Blueberry type mobile phones to read their emails and these often cannot display HTML. Some systems cannot display images. Another constraint might be download speeds. People are increasingly reluctant to wait for an email to display. If it doesn’t appear when expected they will hit the delete button and it will not appear at all.

Even those considerations you might think are simple are often anything but. For instance, you might think that there is a generally accepted norm for the resolution. After all, who uses 800 x 600 on their desktop or laptop nowadays? And even if they did, would you want them as customers?

With all these variations, limitations and constraints you might assume that the best option for marketing emails would be plain text. Yet as everyone with an email address knows, the default for all permission-based emails is HTML. So how do they work that out?

The standard formatting of an email provides a method whereby the recipient’s email client can detect whether it can display the HTML. If it decides it cannot then it generally will opt for the text only version. The third option is that the images will be blocked leaving just a trace around the edges with a small red cross.

Any decent company supplying email marketing software will take all these limitations into consideration so there will be aware of precisely how much freedom you have to exercise your creative urges.