21 ms·

Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

388 points by gk1 9y ago

FussyZeus 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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).
Klathmon 9y ago
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...
- pc86 9y ago
  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?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ams6110 9y ago
    I like the promotional filter too. I never open it.
    - pc86 9y ago
      Which is a shame, because you're incentivizing people to try and get around it. Nobody's forcing you to sign up for these email lists, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I don't understand the hate these lists garner.
- oddlyaromatic 9y ago
  >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.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  > 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.
stevoski 9y ago
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__ 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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%.
jannes 9y ago
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.
- homero 9y ago
  You definitely use html but only <p>, etc
  - icc97 9y ago
    Basically markdown output converted to html
- catshirt 9y ago
  the article is anti-design. not anti-html.
- jasongill 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    > 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".)
  - foo101 9y ago
    Why is sending true plain text email worse for deliverability?
insanebits 9y ago
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.
b__d 9y ago
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.
chippy 9y ago
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?"
- maho 9y ago
  Each email went out to 12,000 people. 125 opened the unstyled mail, 37 opened the styled mail. That result seems pretty significant to me.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrisfosterelli 9y ago
    Yeah, that's statistically significant according to kissmetrics: https://www.kissmetrics.com/growth-tools/ab-significance-test/ https://www.kissmetrics.com/growth-tools/ab-significance-tes...
- gipp 9y ago
  I'd call 1% quite high.
  - gabemart 9y ago
    Really? The last newsletter I sent out went to ~20k people and had a click rate of 18% - although I think that's out of people who opened it, which was 51%. 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
    - gk1 9y ago
      (Author here) It varies. Well done on your 9% overall CTR--that's fantastic for a list of 20k. Not all companies are as fortunate to have an audience like that, so for them an increase from practically 0% to 1% is a big deal, even if there's still more room to improve. 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.
fonziguy 9y ago
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.
Ensorceled 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
HappyKasper 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
mherrmann 9y ago
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
mack1001 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
homero 9y ago
I've always used text emails, but in html for links, and they've done well
rqs 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
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
Nazzareno 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
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
puffyrice 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tylerhou 9y ago
  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.
  - puffyrice 9y ago
    My bad, I might skipped that part. Thanks for clarifying!
  - Double_a_92 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      > 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?
paule89 9y ago
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.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
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.
OliverJones 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Indeed, the example image shows html rendered plain text. Not monospace.
aquamo 9y ago
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.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
I'll say this again - when I check my email, HTML emails go in the bin. Plain text emails get read.
tobiaswright 9y ago
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.
dean 9y ago
> 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.
ynniv 9y ago
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.
bertolo1988 9y ago
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 9y ago
  >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.
  - patrickmay 9y ago
    Exactly. There is no way in hell I want JavaScript running in my email.
  - thefalcon 9y ago
    You will never convince me that Microsoft rendering HTML using the MS Word engine is a feature.
    - bertolo1988 9y ago
      I had nightmares about this during the project. I am not even joking.
CaptSpify 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  I think the KISS acronym is better if you swap the last two "S" words so that its keep it stupid simple. It changes the acronym a bit from KISS to KISS but use your imagination.
some1else 9y ago
How big was the mailing list? In other words: What is the sample size for this experiment?
- taysix 9y ago
  > As one example, I tested two versions of a newsletter that went out to 24,000+ recipients:
vinaypai 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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".
ad_hominem 9y ago
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.
sebringj 9y ago
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.
feelin_googley 9y ago
"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?
Chiba-City 9y ago
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.
JoshMnem 9y ago
The same principle should be applied to web design as well. Keep it simple.
ybalkind 9y ago
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?

388 points by gk1 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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).

Klathmon 9y ago

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...

pc86 9y ago
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?
- deleted 9y ago
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- ams6110 9y ago
  I like the promotional filter too. I never open it.
  - pc86 9y ago
    Which is a shame, because you're incentivizing people to try and get around it. Nobody's forcing you to sign up for these email lists, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I don't understand the hate these lists garner.
oddlyaromatic 9y ago
>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.
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
> 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.

stevoski 9y ago

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__ 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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%.

jannes 9y ago

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.

homero 9y ago
You definitely use html but only <p>, etc
- icc97 9y ago
  Basically markdown output converted to html
catshirt 9y ago
the article is anti-design. not anti-html.
jasongill 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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".)
- foo101 9y ago
  Why is sending true plain text email worse for deliverability?

insanebits 9y ago

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.

b__d 9y ago

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.

chippy 9y ago

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?"

maho 9y ago
Each email went out to 12,000 people. 125 opened the unstyled mail, 37 opened the styled mail. That result seems pretty significant to me.
- deleted 9y ago
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- chrisfosterelli 9y ago
  Yeah, that's statistically significant according to kissmetrics: https://www.kissmetrics.com/growth-tools/ab-significance-test/ https://www.kissmetrics.com/growth-tools/ab-significance-tes...
gipp 9y ago
I'd call 1% quite high.
- gabemart 9y ago
  Really? The last newsletter I sent out went to ~20k people and had a click rate of 18% - although I think that's out of people who opened it, which was 51%. 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
  - gk1 9y ago
    (Author here) It varies. Well done on your 9% overall CTR--that's fantastic for a list of 20k. Not all companies are as fortunate to have an audience like that, so for them an increase from practically 0% to 1% is a big deal, even if there's still more room to improve. 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.

fonziguy 9y ago

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.

Ensorceled 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

HappyKasper 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

mherrmann 9y ago

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

mack1001 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

homero 9y ago

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

rqs 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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 9y ago

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

Nazzareno 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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 9y ago

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

puffyrice 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tylerhou 9y ago
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.
- puffyrice 9y ago
  My bad, I might skipped that part. Thanks for clarifying!
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    > 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?

paule89 9y ago

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.

JohnTHaller 9y ago

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.

OliverJones 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Indeed, the example image shows html rendered plain text. Not monospace.

aquamo 9y ago

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.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

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

tobiaswright 9y ago

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.

dean 9y ago

> 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.

ynniv 9y ago

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.

bertolo1988 9y ago

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 9y ago
>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.
- patrickmay 9y ago
  Exactly. There is no way in hell I want JavaScript running in my email.
- thefalcon 9y ago
  You will never convince me that Microsoft rendering HTML using the MS Word engine is a feature.
  - bertolo1988 9y ago
    I had nightmares about this during the project. I am not even joking.

CaptSpify 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
devmunchies 9y ago
I think the KISS acronym is better if you swap the last two "S" words so that its keep it stupid simple. It changes the acronym a bit from KISS to KISS but use your imagination.

some1else 9y ago

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

taysix 9y ago
> As one example, I tested two versions of a newsletter that went out to 24,000+ recipients:

vinaypai 9y ago

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 9y ago
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".

ad_hominem 9y ago

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.

sebringj 9y ago

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.

feelin_googley 9y ago

"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?

Chiba-City 9y ago

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.

JoshMnem 9y ago

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

ybalkind 9y ago

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?