Loyalty Lab Blog

by Charles Hacskaylo | Chief Creative Officer

Ever notice how you never, ever, see a HTML form in email? Wouldn’t it be great to send a mini-survey to people in an email, and have their answers posted to your database with the push of a “Submit” button? Why doesn’t anyone do that? The short answer is: you can’t. The slightly longer answer requires a little more exploration.

There are two major factors to consider in answering our question, first: our online world, especially with regard to email, is more security conscious then ever. People are already terrified of getting viruses via their email, of getting phished, scammed and having their identity stolen. So the email clients, such as Outlook, Gmail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Thunderbird, and literally hundreds of different webmail applications all implement their own strategies to make their email as secure as possible. Which brings me to the second major factor: unlike web browsers, which at least have the W3C to provide standards definitions on how HTML should be parsed and rendered, there seem to be absolutely no standards on how email security should be approached. So everyone seems to go after this holy grail with differing methods.

After Googling this subject for hours and only finding bits and pieces of the answer, I did a quick test: I put a very simple HTML form with an input box, a select pulldown and a Submit button into an HTML email. I sent it several email accounts I hold. Here’s what happened:

• Gmail: allowed the form to render properly. I could enter text, pull the pulldown, and click the button. But upon submitting the form, I received a security notification from Gmail, and then none of my data made it out. Strike 1.
• Yahoo Mail: same as Gmail. Strike 2.
• Outlook: did not render the form elements, at all. No input field, no pulldown, no Submit button. Strike 3.
• Our corporate webmail system: Same as Gmail for rendering, but when submitting absolutely nothing happened, no data made its way out.

From my previously mentioned Googling, Hotmail seems to disable any forms in email, by removing or rewriting the post method declaration. I haven’t tested Thunderbird or AOL, but at this point I’m willing to bet good money that both will disallow forms in email in some fashion.

I’m willing to concede that there may be a way to add a form to an email that does work, but will bet that solution won’t work for other clients. The bottom line is that forms in email are completely unreliable, due to the lack of any standards around email client security implementations.

So is this bad? Should we rise up and demand of our email client developers the ability to easily spam people with questions in forms? I say no. I believe that people still perceive email as a personal communications medium, akin to a phone conversation. The fact that this medium has been subverted by untargeted email blasts and spam just pisses people off and makes them even more security conscious.

At Loyalty Lab, our system is based on the idea that your email communications with your customers should be targeted, relevant and therefore comfortable for the recipient. We recommend asking your customer for their interaction with a clear call to action, linking to an online form, and offering them a reward when they respond. Our system allows you easily do all these things, reliably. This allows the customer to control the situation and feel empowered. This in turn will increase their positive perception of you and your company, with ultimate benefits for you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Creative and Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.