Can't most of the results be attributed to it simply being different?
If everyone started sending marketing emails like this, then they would start looking like advertisements, they would feel less personal, spam and "promotional" filters would adapt, and you'd be back to square 1.
Plus, I very much like the "Promotional" filters for email, both as someone that receives it, and someone that has sent it.
Email spam is annoying because it's in your way, it interrupts your day, and almost "forces" you to pay attention to it, which is annoying.
The "promotional" tab in gmail (or the similar group in Inbox) fixed that problem for me. Now I go and look through it when I want, and I not only read more of them, but i've done more "action" from them (rather than get annoyed at spam, i've seen that something is on sale, or a new product is released that i was looking forward to).
If there were a way to "mark" my emails to go into that tab voluntarily as a sender, I would do it. The whole idea that you should be fighting against how the user wants to group their email seems backwards. If they don't want to see it, forcing them to see it isn't going to make them like it...
> If everyone started sending marketing emails like this, then they would start looking like advertisements
I’m not sure they would. They’d look more like 'normal' emails. Very few people, in my experience, apply any formatting to their personal emails whatsoever, let alone go to great efforts designing a layout, colour scheme, etc. Currently, 'html email' is almost a euphemism for 'advert'; plain text emails are more like product placement in that they blend in with the 'real' content.
I love the promotional filter. I can look through the 50-60 promos and newsletters I get every day at one shot, open the 0-5 that look interesting then wipe everything. Then something happened where Bryan Harris' VideoFruit emails started coming directly into my inbox rather than the promo folder where they had been.
Guess which is the only email list I've unsubscribed from in the last month?
>If everyone started sending marketing emails like this, then they would start looking like advertisements, they would feel less personal, spam and "promotional" filters would adapt, and you'd be back to square 1.
True, but this is the case for every other marketing technique also. There will never be one permanent "best" way to get the most attention from readers for exactly this reason. The article does seem to miss this aspect. Plain email is currently probably a reasonable move in certain cases, in the ongoing dance of trying to get things read.
I do agree, though, that using plain email to avoid being filtered as a promotional message is not a respectful out very useful angle. I'd prefer to receive lightly formatted newsletters that work fine on mobile and were identified as marketing on my devices.
One way it works better is that there are people, like me, who have noticed that humans who want to talk to me (as opposed to wanting to sell me something) don't send HTML email.
So on my private personal account (not the ones I use for important things like banks), all HTML email is filtered directly to /dev/null.
That's caught exactly one personal email I'm aware of in ~15 years (I forget exactly when I added that to procmail). It might have hit others, but it is a far better false-positive rate than any other individual test.
I was turned on to “no design” newsletters by Jeff Bezos’ updates on Blue Origin. They read and feel like a personal note from him, even though I know I’m just an entry on a big list.
Since then, I’ve made all important announcements to my company’s customers via this “personal”, no-design style. The reply-to is my direct email address, which I think deepens the personal touch of this style, and prevents me from abusing this format for marketing spam (since I inevitably get a few dozen replies from customers every time I send an email like this).
On the note of this style being more effective just because it’s different: There’s certainly an element of that, but I don’t think a really personal-feeling email can work for frequent marketing emails. First, I think the real reply-to is a critical part of a “personal” email, and second, I think companies will understand that this style works better when reserved for infrequent communication that you really want read. At our company, our standard marketing goes out designed. But when I want to announce a new product or feature, I’ll send it out just like an email from my outbox (plus the mandatory unsubscribe link). My customers read those emails more than any others, and I’ve never had a bad response.
Your observation about the reply-to is an important flag.
I almost always instantly delete any email where I see the From: or Reply-To: has noreply@ or the email starts off with
"Please do not reply to this email it is sent from an account which is not monitored"
Unfortunately one of the big transgressors of this are banks and other major service-provider organisations where we have ongoing contract relationships.
My attitude is, if these people do not understand the fundamental purpose of email then, I don't want to deal with it.
In the snail-mail physical postal world - in most jurisdictions - there is a requirement that businesses identify themselves and provide a return or correspondence address.
Just because it's email doesn't obviate this requirement, and pointing to a web-site Contact-Us page is rarely very helpful since that loses context in so many ways.
I have similar anecdata. I have an email list at work for my company’s dealers. When I sent a “service bulletin” formatted as a plaintext email I got much more engagement as judged by the actual replies to that email.
I agree that in certain cases this method is a clear winner.
I've been sending plain emails to my list, because I like the ultra minimalism of it. If I've got two sentences to share with my list my email is "Hi" + two sentences + "Bye" + unsubscribe links.
Does it "convert" better than styled emails? I don't know. I don't care. Does it do well enough to meet my goals. Yes.
There's many things I'd rather be doing with my time than optimising everything for marketing goals.
But the point with the "does it convert better" is a pretty big.
I mean, I work with people who hire marketing consultants who tell them what they need to do for better conversions. All decisions are based on that metric. So I wouldn't expect much change if there are no numbers that tell "plain converts better".
> The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email.
I think this result needs more investigation. We need to know why people open plain email more than those fancy designed ones, rather than just having those numbers.
Designed email, for a lot of companies, is a matter of style, a VI (Visual Identity) for the receiver to remember. It's a good tool to differentiate your services from others.
Also, a well-designed email could increase the efficiency of email reading as you may already familiar with some email and their layouts, so you can guess it's content even you didn't actually read any word in it (Those "What's new" email from Twitter and Facebook for example).
If everybody start to send plain email today, then there will be a whole lot more of reading for the receivers to do.
So for me, I don't reject designed emails, as long as most content in the mail is what I needed. Maybe it's a notification, verification or something like that.
I hate some company send emails which heavily polluted with contents that have nothing to do with me, and if that email was also designed, I hate it even more.
> I think this result needs more investigation. We need to know why people open plain email more than those fancy designed ones, rather than just having those numbers.
I've seen plenty of people who make quite an effort not to receive/open anything that ain't plain text for simple security concerns.
Similarly, many design emails end up being displayed butchered for users due to adblockers/email provider/client blocking outside resources and links.
Imho: If I want a website like experience I can visit the website, emails should be reserved for simple text communications, without adding needless design bloat, but that's just my personal preference.
> We need to know why people open plain email more than those fancy designed ones, rather than just having those numbers
This is interesting. Would you have questioned the numbers if they showed the inverse (ie designed emails have higher click rates)?
> a well-designed email could increase the efficiency of email reading as you may already familiar with some email and their layouts
I don't think this is true at all. IMO test emails are /much/ more easy to read, because I can use a consistent font and layout for /all/ my emails instead of reading through every designers view.
> emails which heavily polluted with contents that have nothing to do with me
Yes text or designed emails don't change any of the contents and spam still is spam. Marking as spam and removing is probably the best option :)
The use of "plain" is slightly confusing. At first I thought you were referring to text/plain MIME type (i.e. truly only unformatted text) but based on your A/B image's hyperlinks it looks like you're still using text/html, just without styling.
Only mentioning it since based on other comments, seems like I wasn't the only one temporarily confused.
A lot of this applies to web-design for (what should be) static sites as well. The more complex and "engaging" you make your site, the less likely people are able to read it cleanly. I wonder if anyone is doing a/b testing with those as well?
At this point that is a feature, not a bug. That's the only explanation as almost all websites for products/services you don't already know of are utterly useless at explaining what precisely it is they do.
I still get pretty upset by this and try to avoid buying from such companies whenever possible in my professional role, but I'm pretty convinced it's on purpose so you have to call someone and let them "engage" you in the "value add" sales process.
My first reaction was curiosity of how they would know the performance of plaintext email, so to spoil the surprise these are HTML emails with a plain design. HTML is still required to track how many people open the email, though obviously not how many click through.
That's very low and yet the result was, loudly claimed in bold, that the plain text one had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email!! Also, the opened rate is within the margin of error and therefore insignificant. I may not be a data analyst, yet I look at the analysis and think to myself, "eh?"
Users can't really tell that an email is styled or plain before opening it, so if the opened numbers were too different, I'd be concerned that something was up.
When he says "plain text email", what he means is "HTML email with very little styling". Sending true plain text email without a multipart HTML section is much worse for deliverability, from my experience (assumedly because plaintext emails are almost always "automatic emails")
I share the sentiment and think there’s a balance.
The problem is a lot of marketers or designers go overboard with HTML emails and they’re overly designed with visuals and graphics in an attempt to look good or match their brand.
Using actual plain text is a bit of a pendulum swing in the other direction though and really restricts things, including the fact you can’t add tracking pixels to get the analytics you might need.
An HTML email that is “designed” to still look like plain text strikes a good balance I think. Allows for some visual type hierarchy improvements, allows for links with clear anchor text and utm tags and any tracking pixels you need. Easier for you the developer to maintain. While at the same time isn’t distracting to the user.
It's gotten so I can instantly recognize the yesware and spam.io templates without even needing to look at the email's html. That plus the prompt to load external images for their 'text only' email that was totally sent by a human and not automatically sent on a 'proven' schedule every week or two in perpetuity. But they're totally not spammers who subscribed your email address to a marketing list without your permission after they bought it from the black market.
I have had a job where they tried to implement emails 4 times. The last attempt is still ongoing and in my opinion destined to fail.
They wanted to implement few dozen of auto generated emails with huge content.
The task was suspended 3 times, always because of the same thing: cost. Its insanely costly and hard to make a good looking cross platform email. After every suspension there were new design changes to implement so we ended up starting almost from scratch in every attempt.
I worked on it for a bit and i can assure you email clients are the biggest shit. Specially Gmail and Outlook.
A few highlights:
* Javascript not allowed.
* Outlook processes HTML and CSS with a specific engine which is also used in Microsoft Word.
* Outlook does not support paddings.
* Gmail requires the styles to be all inline.
* We followed Foundation Zurb recommendations and used tables all over. Still didn't work on all clients.
Humanity urgently needs to replace the emails with something else. Not only because the clients suck but because the protocol is outdated.
I've noticed more web companies lately are opting for much more basic emails than before, it's been a welcome change. Waiting for those image and layout heavy emails to load on a mobile device is pure irritation.
On the other end of that spectrum are the ones I get from ebay, which when the images don't load because security, actually just show as a completely empty email with the only words appearing being "Did you find this email useful?" followed by two broken images. Guess where that goes.
> I've noticed more web companies lately are opting for much more basic emails than before
Part of that is that it is easier to be misidentified (or, of course, correctly identified) as spam by automated checkers the more you do with a message. Logs of image and little text? Higher spam likelihood score, lots of CSS could be trying to disguise real links, higher score, ...
Even if not identified as spam there are less stringent automated classifications that can take your message out of the user's default view (the social and promotions sub-sections of gmail, for instance).
I see in your case text was better performing than html, but I would not bet it's the same for everyone. It's just actually depends, and anyone with a simple A/B test will determine if text is better than email.
However the 5 reasons supporting text email are pretty wrong:
1) Poor rendering. Just use a good email editor, such beefree.io or others. Not a issue at all.
2) Mobile clients. Same as above
3) Email CSS. Same as above
4) Design effort. Yes, if you want a good result, you need a little effort. But if you rely just on text, you should put the same effort in choosing the best words. Consider than with a single Image you can communicate much more (and deeply) than with 20 lines of text.
5) Approval. Any communication department would require to approve email content, not only design.
Regarding the other reasons mentioned:
a) spam filters. Text doesn't change the inbox placement rate, the impact if any is below 0,001%, so totally irrelevant.
b) promotions tab. It actually depends on other variables, it's not a matter of text vs emails. If a transactional messages arrives in Promotions instead of Updates, you should fix the content (use a different IP/domain for transactional vs bulk), not the email format.
c) true, a template looks like something "bulk" or automated, while a simple text email may look like a personal direct email. Unless you want to cheat..
Bad aesthetics and non-existent information architecture of visually obsessed people are unskillful detractions from credible calls to action. Even church and restaurant sites make actionable perusal difficult much less parking an event or registration in a calendar app easily.
Splashing colors, fonts and pictures around free text is not marketing. The prevalent transactional design SOP over the last few decades was A/B's on "pig lipstick" for customers often not capable of judging possibly good outcomes. We suffered (and sold) multiple delusions of "portals" and "destination sites" only imagining their own immersive relevance to customer gazes. Those who did better or avoided over investment were exceptionally wise.
We have years and decades to clean up the Web dump from inoperative airbrushing at most local or broad market service reaches. I don't know who teaches real decision support based information architecture for commercial markets. We have data now on what works and what does not with requisite methods and metrics. Someone might fill a gaping niche.
It's hard to tell for sure from the blurred out image that the blog post contains, but the "designed" email doesn't appear to have actually made any effort at actual design.
It's simply plain text wrapped in boxes with no images other than a logo sloppily dumped on top.
I'd be curious to see a real comparison between emails that had actually had some effort put into design and plain emails.
An informational question about "reputation": the way the big email providers and spam filters figure out whether my emails, or yours, are good or bad.
Does sending text/plain email, with its inability to put in the usual tracking junk like 0x0 pixels, hurt reputation by losing the ability to tell who opened the email?
I've been sending plain text transactional emails (via sendgrid) for years and I've never been dinged for this. I'm talking about welcome, password reset, "you changed your phone number," and that kind of stuff. (I figure the recipient benefits from opening the email as much as I do, so they'll open it.) Plus it's easier to get the job done without the need for designing and testing email templates.
But is email that can't track open rates sustainable going forward? Or will antispam algorithms start distrusting email with "zero" open rates?
There's probably something I don't understand about this. I am seriously looking for information.
Sending emails with no design doesn't mean you send it as plain text. You can still send the HTML version, simply without any markup or styles, and add the tracking stuff there. I think the author is talking more about how it looks rather if it's really plain text email or not.
This is pretty much what I've experienced by accident. There were times in my app that I screwed up and had to send out some emails explaining or to users in some particular situation where it was necessary to communicate something all responding way more than from the MailChimp and had to scramble to get it out, not caring about looks and was high response rate. Another occasion where I was lazy to pretty up the announcement email also had a much better click rate than MailChimp. I was suspecting something was off but seems this article is making me think it wasn't a coincidence.
By the way, you can still send HTML and just wrap a DIV around your pure text with a style="white-space:pre-wrap" along with any font you want which is bad ass as it preserves your return breaks and stuff and you can put <strong> tags or whatever in there and spend way less time.
I really like plain emails.
Often times you have to allow pictures in your email client to load. Be it in the mobile app, you havend received yet a mail from them or you had to reinstall lineageos/custom rom for the X. time this month. So using just plain mail sounds great.
I also like the idea of plain mails minimizing the memory footprint.
This is focused on marketing mail, but (anecdotally) for internal notifications I've found people are much more responsive to lightly styled emails.
We've got a mountain of automated plain text emails written by the less literature elements within IT and all look the same. Often it takes even an expert a few moments to distinguish them. But with a little formatting the key details leap out and you can tell that this one is distinct from that one. Of course, it is just one more thing to sign off (as the article raises) but it's a one time task you can do in ten minutes and yields results for months or years
[+] [-] Klathmon|8 years ago|reply
If everyone started sending marketing emails like this, then they would start looking like advertisements, they would feel less personal, spam and "promotional" filters would adapt, and you'd be back to square 1.
Plus, I very much like the "Promotional" filters for email, both as someone that receives it, and someone that has sent it.
Email spam is annoying because it's in your way, it interrupts your day, and almost "forces" you to pay attention to it, which is annoying.
The "promotional" tab in gmail (or the similar group in Inbox) fixed that problem for me. Now I go and look through it when I want, and I not only read more of them, but i've done more "action" from them (rather than get annoyed at spam, i've seen that something is on sale, or a new product is released that i was looking forward to).
If there were a way to "mark" my emails to go into that tab voluntarily as a sender, I would do it. The whole idea that you should be fighting against how the user wants to group their email seems backwards. If they don't want to see it, forcing them to see it isn't going to make them like it...
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|8 years ago|reply
I’m not sure they would. They’d look more like 'normal' emails. Very few people, in my experience, apply any formatting to their personal emails whatsoever, let alone go to great efforts designing a layout, colour scheme, etc. Currently, 'html email' is almost a euphemism for 'advert'; plain text emails are more like product placement in that they blend in with the 'real' content.
[+] [-] pc86|8 years ago|reply
Guess which is the only email list I've unsubscribed from in the last month?
[+] [-] oddlyaromatic|8 years ago|reply
True, but this is the case for every other marketing technique also. There will never be one permanent "best" way to get the most attention from readers for exactly this reason. The article does seem to miss this aspect. Plain email is currently probably a reasonable move in certain cases, in the ongoing dance of trying to get things read.
I do agree, though, that using plain email to avoid being filtered as a promotional message is not a respectful out very useful angle. I'd prefer to receive lightly formatted newsletters that work fine on mobile and were identified as marketing on my devices.
[+] [-] _jal|8 years ago|reply
So on my private personal account (not the ones I use for important things like banks), all HTML email is filtered directly to /dev/null.
That's caught exactly one personal email I'm aware of in ~15 years (I forget exactly when I added that to procmail). It might have hit others, but it is a far better false-positive rate than any other individual test.
[+] [-] HappyKasper|8 years ago|reply
Since then, I’ve made all important announcements to my company’s customers via this “personal”, no-design style. The reply-to is my direct email address, which I think deepens the personal touch of this style, and prevents me from abusing this format for marketing spam (since I inevitably get a few dozen replies from customers every time I send an email like this).
On the note of this style being more effective just because it’s different: There’s certainly an element of that, but I don’t think a really personal-feeling email can work for frequent marketing emails. First, I think the real reply-to is a critical part of a “personal” email, and second, I think companies will understand that this style works better when reserved for infrequent communication that you really want read. At our company, our standard marketing goes out designed. But when I want to announce a new product or feature, I’ll send it out just like an email from my outbox (plus the mandatory unsubscribe link). My customers read those emails more than any others, and I’ve never had a bad response.
[+] [-] iam-TJ|8 years ago|reply
I almost always instantly delete any email where I see the From: or Reply-To: has noreply@ or the email starts off with
"Please do not reply to this email it is sent from an account which is not monitored"
Unfortunately one of the big transgressors of this are banks and other major service-provider organisations where we have ongoing contract relationships.
My attitude is, if these people do not understand the fundamental purpose of email then, I don't want to deal with it.
In the snail-mail physical postal world - in most jurisdictions - there is a requirement that businesses identify themselves and provide a return or correspondence address.
Just because it's email doesn't obviate this requirement, and pointing to a web-site Contact-Us page is rarely very helpful since that loses context in so many ways.
[+] [-] matt_the_bass|8 years ago|reply
I agree that in certain cases this method is a clear winner.
[+] [-] stevoski|8 years ago|reply
Does it "convert" better than styled emails? I don't know. I don't care. Does it do well enough to meet my goals. Yes.
There's many things I'd rather be doing with my time than optimising everything for marketing goals.
[+] [-] k__|8 years ago|reply
But the point with the "does it convert better" is a pretty big.
I mean, I work with people who hire marketing consultants who tell them what they need to do for better conversions. All decisions are based on that metric. So I wouldn't expect much change if there are no numbers that tell "plain converts better".
[+] [-] gk1|8 years ago|reply
I agree strongly that there are many better things to be doing than fussing with emails, which is why I'm advocating for _not_ wasting time on design.
[+] [-] rqs|8 years ago|reply
I think this result needs more investigation. We need to know why people open plain email more than those fancy designed ones, rather than just having those numbers.
Designed email, for a lot of companies, is a matter of style, a VI (Visual Identity) for the receiver to remember. It's a good tool to differentiate your services from others.
Also, a well-designed email could increase the efficiency of email reading as you may already familiar with some email and their layouts, so you can guess it's content even you didn't actually read any word in it (Those "What's new" email from Twitter and Facebook for example).
If everybody start to send plain email today, then there will be a whole lot more of reading for the receivers to do.
So for me, I don't reject designed emails, as long as most content in the mail is what I needed. Maybe it's a notification, verification or something like that.
I hate some company send emails which heavily polluted with contents that have nothing to do with me, and if that email was also designed, I hate it even more.
[+] [-] gk1|8 years ago|reply
Not surprisingly, those emails resulted in more responses than the long-winded ones.
[+] [-] freeflight|8 years ago|reply
I've seen plenty of people who make quite an effort not to receive/open anything that ain't plain text for simple security concerns. Similarly, many design emails end up being displayed butchered for users due to adblockers/email provider/client blocking outside resources and links.
Imho: If I want a website like experience I can visit the website, emails should be reserved for simple text communications, without adding needless design bloat, but that's just my personal preference.
[+] [-] bjpbakker|8 years ago|reply
This is interesting. Would you have questioned the numbers if they showed the inverse (ie designed emails have higher click rates)?
> a well-designed email could increase the efficiency of email reading as you may already familiar with some email and their layouts
I don't think this is true at all. IMO test emails are /much/ more easy to read, because I can use a consistent font and layout for /all/ my emails instead of reading through every designers view.
> emails which heavily polluted with contents that have nothing to do with me
Yes text or designed emails don't change any of the contents and spam still is spam. Marking as spam and removing is probably the best option :)
[+] [-] ad_hominem|8 years ago|reply
Only mentioning it since based on other comments, seems like I wasn't the only one temporarily confused.
[+] [-] CaptSpify|8 years ago|reply
KISS
[+] [-] phil21|8 years ago|reply
I still get pretty upset by this and try to avoid buying from such companies whenever possible in my professional role, but I'm pretty convinced it's on purpose so you have to call someone and let them "engage" you in the "value add" sales process.
[+] [-] devmunchies|8 years ago|reply
It changes the acronym a bit from KISS to KISS but use your imagination.
[+] [-] ynniv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chippy|8 years ago|reply
Click rate of html email: 0.3%
That's very low and yet the result was, loudly claimed in bold, that the plain text one had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email!! Also, the opened rate is within the margin of error and therefore insignificant. I may not be a data analyst, yet I look at the analysis and think to myself, "eh?"
[+] [-] maho|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gipp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jannes|8 years ago|reply
I was under the impression that people use <img> tags for that.
[+] [-] jasongill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catshirt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hendi_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] homero|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fonziguy|8 years ago|reply
The problem is a lot of marketers or designers go overboard with HTML emails and they’re overly designed with visuals and graphics in an attempt to look good or match their brand.
Using actual plain text is a bit of a pendulum swing in the other direction though and really restricts things, including the fact you can’t add tracking pixels to get the analytics you might need.
An HTML email that is “designed” to still look like plain text strikes a good balance I think. Allows for some visual type hierarchy improvements, allows for links with clear anchor text and utm tags and any tracking pixels you need. Easier for you the developer to maintain. While at the same time isn’t distracting to the user.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertolo1988|8 years ago|reply
They wanted to implement few dozen of auto generated emails with huge content.
The task was suspended 3 times, always because of the same thing: cost. Its insanely costly and hard to make a good looking cross platform email. After every suspension there were new design changes to implement so we ended up starting almost from scratch in every attempt.
I worked on it for a bit and i can assure you email clients are the biggest shit. Specially Gmail and Outlook.
A few highlights:
* Javascript not allowed.
* Outlook processes HTML and CSS with a specific engine which is also used in Microsoft Word.
* Outlook does not support paddings.
* Gmail requires the styles to be all inline.
* We followed Foundation Zurb recommendations and used tables all over. Still didn't work on all clients.
Humanity urgently needs to replace the emails with something else. Not only because the clients suck but because the protocol is outdated.
[+] [-] BeetleB|8 years ago|reply
All the complaints you listed are features in my book. The only problem is that they even allow what they do.
[+] [-] bllguo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amiga-workbench|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FussyZeus|8 years ago|reply
On the other end of that spectrum are the ones I get from ebay, which when the images don't load because security, actually just show as a completely empty email with the only words appearing being "Did you find this email useful?" followed by two broken images. Guess where that goes.
[+] [-] dspillett|8 years ago|reply
Part of that is that it is easier to be misidentified (or, of course, correctly identified) as spam by automated checkers the more you do with a message. Logs of image and little text? Higher spam likelihood score, lots of CSS could be trying to disguise real links, higher score, ...
Even if not identified as spam there are less stringent automated classifications that can take your message out of the user's default view (the social and promotions sub-sections of gmail, for instance).
[+] [-] Nazzareno|8 years ago|reply
However the 5 reasons supporting text email are pretty wrong:
1) Poor rendering. Just use a good email editor, such beefree.io or others. Not a issue at all.
2) Mobile clients. Same as above
3) Email CSS. Same as above
4) Design effort. Yes, if you want a good result, you need a little effort. But if you rely just on text, you should put the same effort in choosing the best words. Consider than with a single Image you can communicate much more (and deeply) than with 20 lines of text.
5) Approval. Any communication department would require to approve email content, not only design.
Regarding the other reasons mentioned:
a) spam filters. Text doesn't change the inbox placement rate, the impact if any is below 0,001%, so totally irrelevant.
b) promotions tab. It actually depends on other variables, it's not a matter of text vs emails. If a transactional messages arrives in Promotions instead of Updates, you should fix the content (use a different IP/domain for transactional vs bulk), not the email format.
c) true, a template looks like something "bulk" or automated, while a simple text email may look like a personal direct email. Unless you want to cheat..
[+] [-] foo101|8 years ago|reply
You want me to use an "email editor" that I had never even heard of before, and yet you claim that the reasons supporting text email are pretty wrong?
[+] [-] Chiba-City|8 years ago|reply
Splashing colors, fonts and pictures around free text is not marketing. The prevalent transactional design SOP over the last few decades was A/B's on "pig lipstick" for customers often not capable of judging possibly good outcomes. We suffered (and sold) multiple delusions of "portals" and "destination sites" only imagining their own immersive relevance to customer gazes. Those who did better or avoided over investment were exceptionally wise.
We have years and decades to clean up the Web dump from inoperative airbrushing at most local or broad market service reaches. I don't know who teaches real decision support based information architecture for commercial markets. We have data now on what works and what does not with requisite methods and metrics. Someone might fill a gaping niche.
[+] [-] vinaypai|8 years ago|reply
I'd be curious to see a real comparison between emails that had actually had some effort put into design and plain emails.
[+] [-] josefresco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OliverJones|8 years ago|reply
Does sending text/plain email, with its inability to put in the usual tracking junk like 0x0 pixels, hurt reputation by losing the ability to tell who opened the email?
I've been sending plain text transactional emails (via sendgrid) for years and I've never been dinged for this. I'm talking about welcome, password reset, "you changed your phone number," and that kind of stuff. (I figure the recipient benefits from opening the email as much as I do, so they'll open it.) Plus it's easier to get the job done without the need for designing and testing email templates.
But is email that can't track open rates sustainable going forward? Or will antispam algorithms start distrusting email with "zero" open rates?
There's probably something I don't understand about this. I am seriously looking for information.
[+] [-] honi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebringj|8 years ago|reply
By the way, you can still send HTML and just wrap a DIV around your pure text with a style="white-space:pre-wrap" along with any font you want which is bad ass as it preserves your return breaks and stuff and you can put <strong> tags or whatever in there and spend way less time.
[+] [-] paule89|8 years ago|reply
I also like the idea of plain mails minimizing the memory footprint.
[+] [-] nmstoker|8 years ago|reply
We've got a mountain of automated plain text emails written by the less literature elements within IT and all look the same. Often it takes even an expert a few moments to distinguish them. But with a little formatting the key details leap out and you can tell that this one is distinct from that one. Of course, it is just one more thing to sign off (as the article raises) but it's a one time task you can do in ten minutes and yields results for months or years