May 13, 2005, Newsletter Issue #99: HTML Newsletters vs PDF (Adobe Acrobat)

Tip of the Week

So you are a technology user and have been publishing your newsletter in Adobe PDF (portable document format). You`ve spent hours laying out the pages in an application such as Word or MS Publisher, converted them to .pdf and uploaded them to the server for your visitors or members to download and read. While this method was the "newest technology" for years, it is time consuming for the creator and can be cumbersome for the readers with slower connection speeds.

Now there is an easier, more palatable option. Create an HTML newsletter, automatically send it to your list of email addresses and have it delivered in either full HTML or a text version that will link to the HTML version on the web. No special software, no large slow files, no headaches. Your readers will love you and you will be using the easiest, fastest state-of-the-art technology. You can also receive reports on who is reading your newsletter, what articles were read the most and use reader polling to get instant feedback directly from them to better serve your members. Can a PDF file do that? Not in this lifetime!

A HTML enewsletter can do all that and more. You can even see how many times the newsletter was opened, which embedded links were of the most interest and what their answers to the poll questions were. You`ll know not only if your enewsletter is reaching the intended address, but also whether it is being read or kept. All of this information can be used to determine if it is being received as well as what content is of interest to better hold your readers` attention in future mailings. The average reader only clicks a small percentage of articles per enewsletter received. Maximize your reach by knowing what your readers want! A PDF newsletter will NEVER give you that information!

In the choice of HTML vs. PDF the clear winner is a HTML newsletter it lets you create and publish a newsletter faster, with more features and reporting than any other application available!

Of course, you could continue attaching the 1Mb+ file to an email, hoping the recipient can download the file (if they bother to try) then save it to their hard drive, then try to find the file they saved, then launch Adobe Acrobat to read the file unless of course they don`t have Acrobat reader at which time they will have to go find where to download another file and install an application just to read your newsletter. Phew! It makes us tired just thinking of it.

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