According to a new report by Jupiter Research rich media e-mail is still too costly and too few recipients can view it, making it impractical for most e-mail marketers to use. A big problem for marketers who want to use rich media is that only 30% of users are able to read rich media, since Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo!, the largest e-mail providers currently don't support rich media content.
Furthermore, rich media e-mail carries a steep price tag. Jupiter Research estimated that a Flash e-mail campaign for a list of 250,000 would cost $43,750, while an HTML campaign would run $27,500. Despite the 60% price premium, the Flash campaign would return a 5% percent conversion rate to HTML's 25%. Definitely not (yet) a good deal.