{"id":54670,"date":"2022-01-25T21:33:28","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T16:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/?p=54670"},"modified":"2022-01-28T21:34:53","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T16:04:53","slug":"keeping-it-simple-html-vs-plain-text-emails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/keeping-it-simple-html-vs-plain-text-emails\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping it Simple: HTML vs. Plain Text Emails"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Few years back everyone was super excited about HTML 5 and CSS3 usage in email marketing. Companies would stuff every bit of that 600px width with design elements and catchy graphics, and spend huge resources to make their emails more mobile friendly.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But now we are coming back to the basics! These days the marketing world is buzzing with increasing email engagement rate via Plain Text Emails.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>HTML Emails<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">HTML emails look super cool and engaging but when we create different sections or blocks in an email and add different layers of elements like banner images, text sections, speaker section, fancy social media section, and footers with lots of embedded links, we add so much code in the background. This code rests on top of the existing layers of <\/span><b>HTML5, CSS3, and\u00a0<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>JavaScript<\/b>\u00a0code.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-54672\" src=\"\/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1119\" height=\"1600\" srcset=\"\/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-1.png 1119w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-1-210x300.png 210w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-1-716x1024.png 716w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-1-768x1098.png 768w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-1-1074x1536.png 1074w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-1-624x892.png 624w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1119px) 100vw, 1119px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Another worry in HTML is that these days hacking\/spamming has reached another level. Hackers abuse emails via email spams, embedded viruses or malware, phishing attacks, spoofing and other email borne malicious threats by exploiting anchor links and JS.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With these growing spamming incident reports, companies have started using anti-spam software like SpamTitan, Avanan Cloud, SaneBox, N-able Mail Assure and many more. These software scan all the emails and filter out the threats.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Once several users block an email with excessive anchor links or too much JS code, all these software make false assumptions and suppress emails leading to lower delivery rate.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Another important factor is the lack of human touch in HTML emails.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In this post-pandemic world we are already seeing a decline in human interaction and when we receive an email which is coming from an XYZ company\u2019s Marketing or Sales department we don\u2019t pay heed to it. It\u2019s just another fish in the ocean. We\u2019re more intrigued by something that\u2019s coming directly from Mr. John Doe even though we have no connection with them.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Plain Text Emails\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Plain Text Emails are more engaging because<\/span><b> it makes a recipient feel that someone has sent them a personal email from their own inbox<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> even though it came from the same Marketing Automation Platform but with a different template.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Here\u2019s how you do it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-54671 size-full\" src=\"\/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-2-e1643385760981.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1600\" height=\"496\" srcset=\"\/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-2-e1643385760981.png 1600w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-2-e1643385760981-300x93.png 300w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-2-e1643385760981-1024x317.png 1024w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-2-e1643385760981-768x238.png 768w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-2-e1643385760981-1536x476.png 1536w, \/blog\/wp-ttn-blog\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MA-Blog-2-e1643385760981-624x193.png 624w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This email is a great example of a Plain Text Email.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It portrays that \u201cAndrew Smith\u201d sent this email to \u201cManmeet\u201d from his personal inbox, which is further reassured by Andrew\u2019s signature. The only automation hint is the unsubscribe link at the bottom but those are mandatory and need to be lived by. Here the recipient would imagine that <\/span><b>Andrew is personally reaching out<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to them instead of a generic company sending another promotion.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At TO THE NEW, we have seen much better email engagement rates with these plain text emails over HTML ones ourselves. Click rates and click through rates have also increased with this template. We even confirmed our results by performing A\/B testing with HTML and Plain-text emails.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What do you think is a better way to reach out to prospective clients? Which mode do you prefer?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Few years back everyone was super excited about HTML 5 and CSS3 usage in email marketing. Companies would stuff every bit of that 600px width with design elements and catchy graphics, and spend huge resources to make their emails more mobile friendly. But now we are coming back to the basics! These days the marketing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1426,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":7},"categories":[1964,1953,4926],"tags":[4913,2128],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54670"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54670"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54674,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54670\/revisions\/54674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}