Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)
gkogan.co
gkogan.co
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...
Guess which is the only email list I've unsubscribed from in the last month?
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.
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.
Outside of technical circles, this isn't really true IME.
I mean, I fought the plaintext good fight for years, but now in the year of our lord 2017, I frequently send emails that include boldfaced headings, indented paragraphs, true bulleted lists, etc., because it improves readability vs. "ocean of plain text" for most people.
So often its primary existence is as a word/PDF file, or in some remote system like corporate Wiki.
The upshot is that anything fancy in the email body is a case of copy pasting and hoping something relatively legible comes out for the people who don't want to download the attachment or click the link.
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.
Regardless how basic the email, it seems Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail always send them in HTML and I need to do something special to send it in plain text.
At work, the mail very often have some sort of minor formatting. A bold sentence here, a reply in a different colour there, or even simply links. Except for automated alert message from a system or another, the emails are basically always HTML.
A lot of my work email indeed is HTML - people do love their red text and jokey memes. I'm talking about my personal mailbox that I use almost exclusively for talking to friends and family.
"Works on my machine."
Except for legitimate automated emails. You know, like email confirmations when creating or updating an account, order confirmations, delivery notices, new login security notices, billing notifications, etc. are often sent in HTML email. If you literally pipe any HTML email to /dev/null, you will not be able to successfully register for any site that requires an email address, which is just about everything in today's world.
Why is why this works, if you have a seperate email account for people, you can then check the email account for companies once a day without missing anything. IMO, it's a great compromise allowing for connectivity without dealing with junk.
I am essentially adding one bit of information to every email.
Setup for a new address is one line in my config management and takes less time to create than a filter in Gmail. There are other benefits, two of which being that it is easy to completely turn off someone who won't stop spamming, and it makes it obvious who is selling your address to whom.
Of course, you need a mail server and a domain, so it isn't for everyone. But this scheme has made it so much easier to control my email.
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.
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 agree that in certain cases this method is a clear winner.
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".
Their catch phrase contains literally no information except a suggestion of 15%.
The null hypothesis should be that plain and rich convert no different. I'd send plain in the absence of any convincing evidence to send rich.
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.
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'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.
Also, I read in plain text. If you want me to read it in HTML format, include a link to the web version and, if I'm interested, I will actually click on that - which has the added benefit of putting me on your site.
Not many do that. 'If you want to read this in HTML format, click this link.' That works and I may very well click it.
Edit:
Never mind. I see they speak of unstyled HTML email, not plain text email. So, the email is still HTML, it's just not pretty. Chances are, I won't notice as I read in plain text most of the time.
Not surprisingly, those emails resulted in more responses than the long-winded ones.
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 :)
I think there are already answers to that, as we actually gradually came from that age where email were just plain text, to today's we have option to send HTML in emails.
> 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.
Well, I think somebody should do a survey for that, about consistent font and layout, easy reading and also fatigue (It apply to driving[0], maybe it also apply to text reading).
And, I don't think plain-text email will be easy to read by natural. Yes, they can be made easy to read, but it doesn't mean they ARE easy to read.
A designed email can be made hard to read, and we call that poorly designed. On the other hand, they can be well-designed and easier to read than plain-text emails.
Boil down, the design of email (whether plain-text or HTML) must serve a purpose. The designer must know what they're doing and hold that purpose in their mind. Plain-text or HTML is a choice they need to made to better fulfill that purpose.
Simply saying one of them is better than the other is inaccurate.
Only mentioning it since based on other comments, seems like I wasn't the only one temporarily confused.
KISS
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.
OR they really have it together, and the design works great for their specific target buyer while turning off irrelevant folks like you.
It changes the acronym a bit from KISS to KISS but use your imagination.
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?"
I don't know much about this space, but 1% of people seems really, really low if it's people who have actually asked you to email them
I should update the post to include a few more recent examples from other companies, that had higher baseline metrics but still saw improvements from simplifying their emails.
I agree with you, but suggest that the frustration is with the broader issue of "noise" pollution created by advertising incentives.
And with the open rate that significantly affected, all other metrics would be skewed as well.
I was under the impression that people use <img> tags for that.
I find that statement very surprising. I haven't sent a single HTML mail in... all the time since I started using email. I never had deliverability problems that I could trace down to the mails being text.
(I also have surprisingly few deliverability problems to begin with and my gut feeling is 90% of hostmaster complains can be described as "you've been blocked by the spam filter because you were sending spam".)
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.
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.
All the complaints you listed are features in my book. The only problem is that they even allow what they do.
[1]Pick your poison, but I find Mailchimp a great mix of easy to use, flexible, and functional.
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.
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).
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..
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?
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.
I'd be curious to see a real comparison between emails that had actually had some effort put into design and plain emails.
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.
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 also like the idea of plain mails minimizing the memory footprint.
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
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/735973/17bdb163fddd41ae/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15478546
Tracking users via email is such a lucrative business, we would need hundreds if not more of these blog posts to even make a small dent in the mindshare that HTML email has captured. How many phishing attacks rely on HTML email? All of them?
I've seen it countless times, at this point "plain emails work better" is an elephant in the room.
If I turn them off, half of my mails still get sorted somewhere that I cant see.
When the tabs were first enabled, I deselected all of them except the primary tab & haven't had any problems. The primary tab is essentially my one tabbinbox. I did...
Gmail.com > Settings > Configure Inbox > deselect all except primary
Or do you have a different issue?
That's interesting. I wonder how this would have any effect on opening an email. In my mail clients on mobile and desktop, I cannot tell if an email is styled or not just by looking at the list of messages in my inbox. I have to actually open it to see if it's styled.
Now, sending cold emails is old school. What works these days is to leverage one of two things:
1. A general feeling surrounding the market.
2. An influencer.
For #1, we can use the following example:
There is a lot of interest in machine learning. The market is feeling positive about it. People in the market want to learn ML. You happen to sell a course on learning ML. The focus would be on creating content around learning ML and offering additional value through a newsletter. You then reinforce your pitch on the newsletter.
For #2, it's a similar process. See below:
In this case, you'd hire / partner with someone known in a specific market. Let's use ML trainings again. Your job is to provide the influencer with an offer that is highly valuable to their audience. Then have the audience subscribe to your newsletter.
To put it into a concrete example: the influencer might do a daily live stream of them going through your ML course and provide buy it now links to the audience and a way to try out the materials themselves by joining your newsletter. That's it.
Email is still very alive and kicking.
Can I use very basic styling like bold, ordered lists and href links just to make the text more readable? Or do advocates of the plain email philosophy generally suggest 100% plain?