Guy Kawasaki on the Art of Email   - 1,988 Views,

While it’s a wonderful book for all sorts of reasons, and highly recommended reading for anyone who has ever started, is starting, or is going to start pretty much anything ever (in fact it’s a great book for anyone who is in charge of anything, as well) Aunty especially would like to call to your attention the section on the “Art of Email”.

Kawasaki, whose previous books include “Selling the Dream” and “How to Drive Your Competition Crazy”, and who is no business or marketing slouch, talks about various things which are email, and therefore business, killers. In this he includes having email subjects which make your email look more like spam than a follow-up to a business discussion, and having your own name improperly formatted in your outgoing email.

In fact he recommends sending yourself email and taking a good loook at how it appears on the receiving end, including formatting.

He also takes aim at HTML mail. He really doesn’t like HTML mail. In fact, he assumes HTML mail is spam, and lets his spam-filter eat it for breakfast. And this is a well-respected marketer, and computer legend! Are you listening email marketers? If the Guy Kawasaki’s of the world (ok, there is only one Guy Kawasaki, but you know what Aunty means) are dumping HTML mail unread as ’spam’, you can be sure that your low open rates are due to legions of end users who are doing the same thing. Oh sure, many email marketers claim to have ways to determine whether the user’s email client displays HTML or just plain text, and deliver accordingly; but a really smart system would be one which detects whether users bother to read HTML mail, or just plain text. Hint: the latter is the safer bet.

An in-depth review of the email section of the book is available in this ClickZ column (if the column does not appear, check back on Sunday night or Monday).

It’s a very well-written, and indeed highly entertaining book. And it’s available here from Amazon:

[Disclaimer: The above Amazon link contains an Amazon affiliate i.d.. If you find this objectionable, you can go directly to Amazon and search for "Kawasaki Art Start" and find the book that way. Aunty won't mind.]