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Time to read: 5 minutes
A plain text email is the most stripped-back version of an email. Forget about the emails that fill your promotions tab with images, multiple columns, buttons, and links. The plain text email is like a page written via a typewriter—all you get is text.
While basic, there’s a time and place for plain text emails, even in marketing. Let’s talk about what it is, how it works, why it works, and best practices around plain text emails.
When you think of a plain text email, what comes to mind? Is it a quick email that you send to your boss with a link to your latest project? What about an email you send to your friend that includes photos of your kids?
While these emails are simple, they’re not plain text. Plain text emails only include text, which means links, images, and even bolded or underlined text are not available in plain text emails.
To demonstrate the differences between plain text and other email types we’ll break down the capabilities and provide examples of each email format.
With plain text, you can include written text, but you’re unable to:
Embed links
Use stylistic elements like bold, italics, or underlining
Include images
Because stylistic elements are unavailable, formatting plain text emails can be tricky. Keep the emails short and sweet and break up the text with spaces between paragraphs to make it easier to read.
Rich text emails, on the other hand, are what we commonly send from our personal and professional inboxes. This email type allows us to stylize text with bold characters, bullet points, and colors. While plain text emails have the functionality of a typewriter, rich text emails offer the capabilities of a Word document.
With rich text emails, you can:
Include images
Stylize text
Add colors
Embed links
In this rich text email example, the formatting is much easier to read than the plain text above. With embedded links, bullets, and bolded text, the information is broken out in a more digestible manner.
Take a look at the promotional section of your inbox. You’ll likely see emails with a variety of images in multi-column formats. There may be bright colors, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and fun fonts. These are HTML emails or hypertext markup language, a programming language used to build websites and, in our case, design emails.
HTML emails offer:
Background colors
Multi-column layouts
The use of embedded or hosted images
Text stylization such as bold, italics, and underlining
Bullets and numbers
Embedded links and CTA buttons
Most HTML attributes
In the example below from Twilio’s Consumer Preferences Report, you’ll find a variety of colors, images, and CTA buttons, that create a well-designed HTML email.
You may be wondering, what’s the advantage of using plain text emails if they’re so basic? Why would anyone create a plain text email if HTML emails offer so many robust features? There are a few key advantages to plain text emails:
Works on every device: There’s no need to design emails for both desktop and mobile—plain text emails look the same across devices. It is also accessible across devices such as Apple Watches or other Internet of Things devices, which cannot read HTML emails.
Quickly loads: Unlike emails that include high-quality images or other forms of multimedia, plain text emails have a much smaller file size than HTML emails and load quickly.
Better for accessibility: Text-to-voice readers are more easily able to process and read plain text emails. For those who are visually impaired, plain text emails are much better at sharing key pieces of information.
Improves deliverability: Email service providers (ESPs) are believed to prefer emails that are sent with a plain text version. Those with plain text emails are more likely to be delivered to the primary inbox.
Most plain text emails are used for transactional purposes, such as a receipt or order confirmation, like that of the email example below. With this type of email, you’re not looking to engage contacts, as much as provide a record of the service.
The reason that plain text emails aren’t often used for marketing is that it’s very challenging to track engagement. Without links embedded into the email, you can’t track click-through rates or understand who is engaging with what content.
However, it all comes down to your audience. If you're a backpacking company and your customers are often remote, hiking through mountains, then plain text may be the way to go.
Or, if you’re a nonprofit that serves the visually impaired, plain text will be much easier for a voice reader to process than a plain text email.
A tactic that many marketers employ is look-alike plain text emails. While technically HTML emails, the content is often stripped down with no visual elements and only a link or two incorporated into the email.
These emails can feel more authentic and are a great way to engage your contact base. Take a look at the simple email below sent by Neil Patel. It’s not a plain text email, but it feels like something your friend or colleague would send your way rather than a digital marketing firm. And, you still get the benefits of tracking click-through rates.
If you’d like to change how you send your personal or professional emails, you can do so within your inbox settings.
For example, with Gmail, you can update what you send when you compose a message.
Click on the three dots at the right side of the toolbar and toggle on/off the option that says “Plain text mode.”
For email marketing or transactional email campaigns, you can send plain text emails via your ESP. Most ESPs send both plain text and HTML emails to the email client. The email client then chooses which email to display according to the user’s settings.
However, plain text emails are often automatically converted to HTML. To send only plain text emails using Twilio SendGrid you need to set the "content-type" to "text/plain" in your API request. This informs Twilio SendGrid that the email body is plain text and should not be automatically converted to HTML.
For the majority of people, HTML emails are preferable. They give you more options to create engaging emails and make it easier to track engagement rates.
Our best advice is to test what works best for you and your audience. From there, you can make data-informed decisions to optimize your email marketing program and reach your audience in the format they prefer.
For help sending both plain text and HTML emails, explore Twilio SendGrid, a comprehensive email platform that will help you scale your email program as your business grows.
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