Don't Design Your Emails (2016)

Something else I hate: long tracking links that inevitably get a %20 in them somehow and don’t work unless I edit the link myself. Just use a normal link to your page and don’t make things more difficult for your users by bouncing through some intermediary that might malfunction. I’ve given up on several purchases because the link in the email didn’t just work.

In other words, to get your mass emails read, mimic personal emails more closely. It's a hack to use our noise filters against us. It's not exactly a dark pattern, even if it does make it a little harder for us to distinguish the signal.

Cool, except clients (at least mine) absolutely hate unstyled email. They want their branding all over it, and they want that impression of polish, they don’t care how much statistical evidence you provide.

One option is to let the recipient decide the format they prefer.

May I say that it's refreshing to see a well-written blog post on HN that doesn't use uncanny ML generated imagery? Nice post!

(2016)

Like nothing changed since then? HTML support is more common and widely accepted than ever and well standard now for marketing emails. Not to mention the massive dominance of mobile mail reading etc. It's all the use-case.... Transactional emails maybe a case for plaintext, but marketing and newsletters etc...? HTML is fine. Not much relevancy now.

Put some effort into your designs so your message and UX comes across well. That's the advice.

I don't like articles like this in general, but why would open rates be relevant here? Presumably neither email can be seen until it's opened?

Good advice and works even better these days because : enshittyfication awareness and llm assisted wording for the optimal wall of text bricklayer block size.