
Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016) - gk1
https://www.gkogan.co/blog/dont-design-emails/
======
fonziguy
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.

------
ad_hominem
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.

------
ynniv
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.

------
JohnTHaller
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.

------
Chiba-City
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.

------
FussyZeus
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.

~~~
dspillett
_> 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).

------
vinaypai
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.

~~~
josefresco
I also thought the example was poor. Shared with a coworker in my office and
her initial response was "they both look like they have no design".

------
CaptSpify
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?

KISS

~~~
phil21
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.

~~~
shimon
Maybe. But in many cases it's not a deliberate choice about motivating user
behavior, it's about satisfying some highly-paid person's idea of how their
business is special so the design must also be special.

OR they really have it together, and the design works great for their specific
target buyer while turning off irrelevant folks like you.

------
sebringj
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.

------
HappyKasper
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.

~~~
iam-TJ
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.

~~~
astura
Banks can't be taking inquiries over email because it's not a secure way to
communicate. They have to take inquiries through their own secure messaging
systems.

------
paule89
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.

------
Nazzareno
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..

~~~
foo101
> Poor rendering. Just use a good email editor, such beefree.io or others. Not
> a issue at all.

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?

------
nmstoker
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

------
feelin_googley
"The trouble with text-only email"

[https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/735973/17bdb163fddd41ae/](https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/735973/17bdb163fddd41ae/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15478546](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?

------
OliverJones
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.

~~~
honi
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.

~~~
icc97
Indeed, the example image shows html rendered plain text. Not monospace.

------
insanebits
Most of the designed emails have images which will be blocked by the
client(thunderbird), which looks really horrible. So I will have to be very
interested to actually allow images to be downloaded.

------
rqs
> 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.

~~~
freeflight
> 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.

~~~
KGIII
How do they know they are HTML before they open them?

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.

------
zappo2938
We did the same thing however we branded with a background color and logo
instead of a newsletter. [0] Great results.

[0] [https://imgur.com/a/lTrYJ](https://imgur.com/a/lTrYJ)

------
aquamo
I try to force email to look like an RFC (e.g. [https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-
notes/rfc-index.txt](https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-index.txt)) or
UseNet posting using GNUS or some other text only mail reader. Getting rid of
all the animated images, markup noise, etc. allows me to focus on the pure
information in the email. If the images are valuable, I'll open them up but
it's surprising not that important most of the time. YMMV.

------
mherrmann
Funny, I just posted a Show HN yesterday with another technique for increasing
click/open rates [1]. Maybe some of the people reading this will find it
interesting as well. The "design" is also very similar.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15510173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15510173)

------
dean
> The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more
> recipients...

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.

------
homero
I've always used text emails, but in html for links, and they've done well

------
ybalkind
Really interesting article. How far does this logic apply?

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?

------
Ensorceled
This might work until the bulk of users, like me, get so many "drip" emails a
day that I have the opposite reaction to these types of "plain" emails.

~~~
hashmal
Considering how most companies are structured, it's not ready to happen.
Usually there's a guy high in the hierarchy who will "think like a user" and
say that "users love pretty stuff" and damn, "we're professionals, we have to
look professional."

I've seen it countless times, at this point "plain emails work better" is an
elephant in the room.

------
tobiaswright
Generally I buy the argument, but I don't think the fact that it's easier to
act when viewing from mobile was given enough weight. I think that probably
made a huge difference. I'd love to see those stats.

------
b__d
click rate is mere a metric for engagement. it's worth more or less nothing
from business perspectives. i'd love to see a similar test with b2c content
and KPIs like conversion. etc.

------
jannes
How is it even possible to track the open rate without HTML? I'm not an email
expert and genuinely curious.

I was under the impression that people use <img> tags for that.

~~~
jasongill
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")

~~~
hannob
> 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 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".)

------
mack1001
Email marketing is such a thankless process, with really low conversion of any
sorts and irritation the usual emotion associated with it. Having sent several
cold campaigns and reported on (sorry) we just stopped it entirely. Unless you
have a credible brand sending emails is like having a twitter handle.

~~~
pryelluw
Ive sent many campaigns and theyve mostly been received with open arms
(including cold oned). The difference (IMO) is how much value you send on each
email. If it's a standard pitch then forget about it. A good email campaign is
more about making a connection than making a one stop sale. Think of it as a
door to door salesperson selling pots and pans versus an insurance salesperson
who just wants to get to know and protect you. Always put people first and
they will respond positively.

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.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I'll say this again - when I check my email, HTML emails go in the bin. Plain
text emails get read.

------
JoshMnem
The same principle should be applied to web design as well. Keep it simple.

------
stevoski
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.

~~~
k__
I like plain emails much more than styled ones.

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".

~~~
boffinism
The article references a 3x click rate improvement, which is pretty good.
Although this is just one data point (and there's a bias at play: All the
people who tried plain text emails and _didn 't_ see a conversion increase
won't have bothered writing a blog post about it).

~~~
IgorPartola
Hah. Save 15% or more with GEICO. And all other insurance companies have
similar slogans. Why can’t you just keep switching between them until you pay
nothing?! :)

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
Their phrase is “...could save you 15% or more,” which, incidentally, includes
any potential savings between zero and one hundred percent.

Their catch phrase contains literally no information except a suggestion of
15%.

~~~
ldiracdelta
15% savings could also be the threshold of complacency vs pain for most
people. Most insurance companies probably show a 15% savings for people to go
through the hassle of switching.

------
chippy
Click rate of plain text email: 1%

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?"

~~~
tgb
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.

~~~
yellowapple
Per the article, it's probable that the styled emails are being flagged as
promotional (or outright spam) and thus being filtered from immediate view by
various mail clients (including Gmail).

~~~
tgb
Good point!

------
some1else
How big was the mailing list? In other words: What is the sample size for this
experiment?

~~~
taysix
> As one example, I tested two versions of a newsletter that went out to
> 24,000+ recipients:

------
bertolo1988
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.

~~~
BeetleB
>I worked on it for a bit and i can assure you email clients are the biggest
shit.

All the complaints you listed are _features_ in my book. The only problem is
that they even allow what they do.

~~~
thefalcon
You will never convince me that Microsoft rendering HTML using the MS Word
engine is a feature.

~~~
bertolo1988
I had nightmares about this during the project. I am not even joking.

~~~
thefalcon
You don't have to convince me. Writing HTML e-mails, especially for higher ups
that have no concern for the limitations of the platform, is awful. This is
why I just insist on using Mailchimp templates these days[1]. They've done the
hard work, it just works (usually), let's just focus on content.

[1]Pick your poison, but I find Mailchimp a great mix of easy to use,
flexible, and functional.

------
puffyrice
The opening rate is irrelevant. The users can’t predict if it’s a HTML or
plain text email before opening. It’s just accidentally higher on the plain
text side.

~~~
tylerhou
The author claims that plain text emails are "less likely to go into the
'Promotions' tab in Gmail" and are "less likely to be caught in spam filters,"
both of which might increase open rate.

~~~
Double_a_92
Those damn tabs literally ruined my gmail. :(

If I turn them off, half of my mails still get sorted somewhere that I cant
see.

~~~
amorphid
> 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?

------
Klathmon
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...

~~~
_jal
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.

~~~
gutnor
Do the email client still default to TXT nowadays ?

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.

~~~
_jal
Most of my friends and family to use Gmail; one uses Hotmail, and I have no
trouble getting mail from any of them. I have no idea what Outlook does.

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."

