The return of plain text emails!
Today I celebrate the return of plain text emails!
I hope this will lead, one day, to the eventual elimination of HTML emails altogether.
I am not a fan of HTML emails. These are emails that have styling applied to them, like simple web pages. They often have columns that are impossible to see on a mobile phone, coloured backgrounds, lots of red x’s where the images have been blocked, text in tiny fonts and so on.
You end up having to zoom in with your mobile device, sometimes they have banner images that create a horizontal bar because they are so wide and, when you reply to it, all that messy styling gets included in the bottom, causing that dreaded horizontal bar to remain for as long as the email thread does!
A recent audit highlighted this as an issue
I undertook an audit for a large ecommerce store last year. One of the aspects I looked at was the emails that were sent automatically to the customer. This would include when creating an account, signup up for special offers, placing an order and so on. Each one was a styled HTML email. It had lots of tiny images that were all blocked, the disclaimer text that was so small it was completely unreadable and it just looked messy.
It was also completely inaccessible, as HTML emails usually are.
However, when I received an email from one of the customer support team, it was a different story. A clean email with a logo in the footer. It looked lovely, so much more professional than the HTML emails I had been receiving.
Another digital marketing activity
So why I am celebrating this now? Simple, because of lead gen marketing!
I have been looking into this and what I have learned is that key to successful lead gen marketing is ensuring the deliverability of your emails.
To do so, the marketing emails sent out should be plain text, with no images and not even containing any links. Doing this increases your deliverability score.
(By the way, I know people who undertake lead gen activity are rolling their eyes as I am stating the blooming obvious!)
It has made me, at least, very happy, because it means that plain text emails are becoming more and more common, as more people realise that doing this for all their emails will reduce the chance of their emails ending up in a SPAM folder.
I hope one day we will see HTML emails consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas, along with using tables for layout!
I find it interesting that digital marketing activity will then both be the cause and the cure!
Caption: a plain text email on a piece of paper, in an envelope. Rays of light come out from the centre
