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Is e-mail a dead medium or are graphics making it ghost-like?

Posted by Bob Brin on May 2, 2008 at May 2, 2008 1:27 PM

I don't really buy that e-mail is a dead communications form. If it is, I spend a good deal of my day in deadsville. As my official representative of the up-and-coming generation, my fourteen-year-old daughter doesn't do a lot of e-mail, but she doesn't have a job, either. The rest of us have to live in e-mail. But while e-mail isn't dead, there are some e-mail marketers doing everything they can to kill it. Take a look at this e-mail I just received, ironically from some guy trying to show off his photography business: Actually, this e-mail doesn't just contain graphics; it's all graphics. One of the best things you can do to get your e-mail read is to, like, use some text. Not type imbedded in graphics, but good old HTML text. Your creative or e-mail marketing folks should be testing your e-mails to make sure that they display some important words when the graphics don't get through, especially when most people have graphics turned off for their e-mail preview. In marketing communications days gone by, we used to say, "Graphics exist to draw the eye to copy." In the case of e-mail, the opposite is true. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but words are still the basic currency of communications.

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