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

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