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HTML AND Plain Text version of email campaign

Participant ,
Jul 07, 2013 Jul 07, 2013

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As it is best practice to send out both version of an email to prevent email campaigns looking like spam I was wondering if a)BC automatically does this, b) the best way for clients to do this if not, and c)will this be a available any time soon?

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Advocate ,
Jul 07, 2013 Jul 07, 2013

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I think on BC it's one or the other.  You can setup a campaign as an HTML campaign OR a text campaign.  This might be an issue and thankfully you can include the "view in browser" link in the email campaign for those email clients that don't support HTML.

I had a client who had lots of overseas customers, most of whom used a similar, non-html supported email client so we decided to create a web form where they could sign up for the email newsletter and choose to receive HTML or text campaigns and based on their selection we subscribed them to "Customers - HTML" or "Customers - Text" campaigns respectively.  They would send two email campaigns everytime with the same content but one was stripped down to just text and sent to the "Customers - Text" list and the regular HTML campaign was sent to "Customers - HTML".  It's not pretty but it works.

This is a good suggestion for BC's email campaign functionality.  Typically, I use the BC email campaign solution for customers just getting started with email campaigns and if their list grows pretty large I would port their list over to MailChimp or Campaign Monitor and update their newsletter signup form to that service as well and have them start using that since there's likely more of a chance some users might not be able to receive HTML emails if their list was large and diverse.

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LEGEND ,
Jul 07, 2013 Jul 07, 2013

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Could you point to where you see it best practise to send both versions of an email campaign?

I have not seen this and would consider this very spamy and one or the other would likely get blocked by email services or clients since its a double up other then the content.

I have seen a single email text and a link to a web page but text only email campaigns appear very unprofesional.

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Participant ,
Jul 07, 2013 Jul 07, 2013

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You could just google it, it has been best practice for a long time. We usually use campaign monitor and sometimes mail chimp but a new client want to try and keep everything in BC.

Here's some great info from mailchimp for you to check out, take note of the Multipart/Alternative MIME format section.

http://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-field-guide/html/

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LEGEND ,
Jul 07, 2013 Jul 07, 2013

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Ahh you mean  Multi Part MIME,

Slightly different from sending multiple emails of different type though.

But my next question is how many people turn off html emails in their email client? On a mobile it is on by default, browser based of course it is on by default. Thunderbird and any email client made in the last 5-8 years its on by default. Every outlook I have ever used it is on by default.

Not putting the idea down, Just looking at what Adobe BC would do in terms of - Is it really worth it?

This shows the good positives:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32643/Why-Marketers-Must-Optimize-Emails-for-HTML-AND-Pl...

Step one for BC at the moment is to sort the derliveribility of the current system though, its not doing to well and needs some work once the migrations are complete.

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Advocate ,
Jul 07, 2013 Jul 07, 2013

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Most of the services that focus only on email campaigns like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor have been using multi mime types to send both HTML and text campaigns as one campaign for a while now.

I don't think there are many email clients left that DON'T support HTML mime types...

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LEGEND ,
Jul 08, 2013 Jul 08, 2013

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True, they been using for a while now, but my question is, BC is late on this but is it still needed?

I can see lots of advantages as well Tim but none say it helps with spam, I cant find any info to validate that.

In terms of HTML things, that is a different story, what you said in your post is not quite right. HTML in email you do nothing modern, thats plane across the board for email campaigns, thats a given and not that related here. IT is moreover the CSS etc in terms of wider compatabilty variations.

Follow the rules and make them correctly though and this is not a problem.

Emails like notifications this would make sense. A newsletter campaign just having a plain text option would have very poor open rates? Does not look very attractive.

If your using the campaigns with this in mind for a specific format of content then you can do that in BC. But if you have the choise and your doing HTML I bet the open rate variation would not be that much different with just a text one included also. If you opened a text version of what is more effective in HTML I could see more people unsubscribing from that option.

Also all your tracking would be more out of whack as you cant properly track if people were opening plane text versions.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 16, 2013 Oct 16, 2013

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Sorry to dig up an old post, but we've spent the last few days trying to work out why an email campaign being sent from BC is going into the Junk folder of recipients that use MS Exchange. We've fixed quite a lot of issues, including the fact that Legacy Templates have random JS injected just before they get sent, so we had to switch to the new template system. We've narrowed the issue down to one of three things:

1. A missing alt tag on the tracking image that BC drops into the email (pretty unlikely)

2. The BC Europe IP (54.240.14.45) is blacklisted here: UCEPROTECTL2 (possible, but if you actually look it's not the IP itself, but another IP on the same network, so unlikely)

3. The fact that the HTML email has no text component.

I agree, BC is late on this but I think that it needs to be added, even if most users have HTML-ready email clients, spam checkers do seem to prefer multi-MIME emails.

This is backed up by the following SpamAssassin rule, which we are currently unable to resolve:

-1.105MIME_HTML_ONLYMessage only has text/html MIME parts
You should also include a text version of your message (text/plain)

So in my opinion, BC do still need to add this as a feature, otherwise the system is not viable for our customers and we'll have to look elsewhere.

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Participant ,
Oct 16, 2013 Oct 16, 2013

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Agreed!

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Advocate ,
Oct 16, 2013 Oct 16, 2013

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I brought up the javascript issue years back and it's still not fixed?

Oy. Most our the time they bc mail end up as spam it's because I forgot to

add an spf record to the domain allowing bc to send in it's behalf.

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Participant ,
Jul 07, 2013 Jul 07, 2013

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There are a number of reasons of why it is worth it. The biggest is that having both HTML and plain text versions available gives a campagin better points with spam filters, add that with accessability and incombatibility then you have some great reasons of why it is worth it. Many webmail clients, including BC's basic webmail, either have problems loading certain HTML tags in emails or simply do not read any HTML so when HTML emails come through on BC they look terrible.

A baseline standard should never, ever be a question of if something is 'worth it'. With that kind of attitude BC will continue to be viewed as an inferior product.

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