Text Email Returns. Back to the ‘Old Skool’
by matt @ 5:29 pm. Blogged under Email Marketing
In 2002 email marketing was seeing the march of lovely, ‘exciting’, colourful, image-filled HTML beauties. These new emails were enabling us to A/B test all manner of factors due to their pixel tracking capability – informing us of open rates, click through rates and pass-alongs. However, after seeing years of continually falling open rates, default image blocking as high as 50%, preview windows and consequential problems with graphic ad serving I am going back to the old skool with .txt as a default preference for all future campaigns and e-newsletter templates.
This decision hasn’t been reached on some whim, recent years of testing and analysis with millions of e-newsletters has demonstrated clearly to me that .txt formatted e-newsletters now see better click-throughs than HTML – especially on their sponsored ad units. A half way house attempt of combining graphic logos with text did help to some extent but the sheer effort of managing and reporting on these ‘combo’ format ads is not really worth the effort.
Of course, yes I’ll be losing the ability to track email open rates – but who needs the data now anyway? If you’re a seasoned email marketer like me you’ve read all the books, done all the testing and seen that image blocking has become a bit of a nightmare hurdle. You know what works and what doesn’t, and frankly I don’t need to see the open rates dropping again and again, I have Email Labs industry trend reports to tell me what I am in all probability experiencing.
Instead I shall settle for the peace of mind of knowing that what I send out gets delivered exactly as I see it, recipients can open and browse them more quickly, nobody will have to switch on image downloading, competitors will lose out to my easy to read basic alerts and advertisers can track their ‘increased’ click rates via redirect monitoring. I’ll settle for tinkering with subject lines and good old fashioned marketing copy as my tools of impact.
So it’s with much joy I say goodbye to HTML emails and a big hello to my old friend .txt – you were almost down and out but now you’re fighting back.
A useful related article from MailChimp (SurveyMonkey’s brother?): Why bother with plain-text emails?
Technorati Tags: email marketing, .txt email, email format, html emails, email readers, plain text,
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May 1st, 2008 at 1:47 pm
This was an interesting read and I was quite suprised that you think a text format is better than HTML. I read that doubleclick in 2002 found that on average HTML format achieved a 1.4-1.7 better response rate, I guess we have to look at things like the increase in popularity of blackberrys and palm tops since then which I suppose must have increased the effectiveness of text copy? and then subject of email? I often get emails from a clothes store but can’t say I would find an email from them very engaging in text. What about the branding benefits of HTML? An interesting entry however I believe HTML is the way to go.
May 1st, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Yeah that was in 2002 though littlesis, since then image blocking has become common place. M&S send me marketing emails all the time made 100% of images, they don’t even get opened when I see all those red crosses in my preview window. I liked what the MailChimp article said:
“in certain situations, plain-text emails can be better than HTML emails. If you send daily alerts, news feeds, and things that are sent very frequently and need to be quickly scanned, plain-text works great. You don’t want to send huge, image-heavy emails every day. People will burn out fast”.
May 1st, 2008 at 4:55 pm
hmmm… but you lose the branding and no images means you reduce the user engagement. I receive emails from lots of companies but how hard is it to click allow images?
May 1st, 2008 at 5:27 pm
For a web savvy person like you and I not hard, but for the multitude of idiots who still don’t even seem to be able to figure out what web page they are on it’s quite hard