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Ask HN: Plain text emails in 2017?

4 points by notrheadagain ↗ HN
Hi, guys. From day to day, we send lots of emails and a huge fraction of those are of marketing nature. We're used to actionable HTML stuff in our inbox, and there are very few clients that don't support HTML email layouts. Still, we usually send two versions. HTML and plain text. Do we really need to send plain versions or it's just a second system syndrome of doing everything "right"?

10 comments

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dozzie
> Do we really need to send plain versions or it's just a second system syndrome of doing everything "right"?

Yes, you do need to send plain versions. I make my e-mail clients to use plain text version first, and if that's not available, HTML version dumbed down to plain text. The cases when somebody needs to send formatted e-mail are really, really rare. Though...

> From day to day, we send lots of emails and a huge fraction of those are of marketing nature.

...I delete marketing e-mails on the spot.

notrheadagain
Personally, I agree emails should be sent in two versions. However, there's a trend of sending just HTML. This article was written some time ago https://litmus.com/blog/best-practices-for-plain-text-emails... and latest comments will also promote the idea of dumping plain text.

Regarding marketing emails, I mean every automated email sequence. Like, you definitely get receipts and stuff over email. And those aren't written by hand.

dozzie
Receipt or order confirmation is not (or at least should not be) a marketing e-mail. It's a technicality necessary for transaction.
notrheadagain
However, the rule of thumb, especially for drip campaigns, is that you do get some marketing content with almost every email. This could be a specific sign off and such.
curtisblaine
> Yes, you do need to send plain versions. I make my e-mail clients to use plain text version first, and if that's not available, HTML version dumbed down to plain text.

So if OP sends an HTML mail, you will be able to read it anyway, proving that they don't need to send plain text at all :)

dozzie
Sure, if he doesn't care that his fancy tables and CSS formatting will look like sh&t on my terminal, defeating the very first thing that marketing material must do: look good.
notrheadagain
The plain text versions I was talking about are those well-formatted and structured ones. Where you get the minimalistic beauty of simple formatting. Markdown-style, maybe.
curtisblaine
> Do we really need to send plain versions or it's just a second system syndrome of doing everything "right"?

It depends on your costs / target ratio. You will have a percent of users that absolutely need to get text emails. If delivering text e-mails to them gets you more money than you spend sending the two versions, send them. Otherwise, just send the HTML ones.

Same for browser support. If, for example, you spend more supporting IE than you gain from only-IE users, just don't support IE.

notrheadagain
Well, I agree here. However, it's pretty hard to include click tracking into plain text emails. So it may be complicating attributing revenue to those. The way out here would be utms or stuff like bit.ly
gradschool
I agree with the suggestion that you analyze how much of your sales are to customers who prefer plain text and assess whether it covers the cost of maintaining it. However, the numbers might not tell the whole story because some people deliberately block or ignore html mail even though they could figure out how to read it if they really wanted to. You probably don't monitor the replies to your marketing emails so you'll miss the replies requesting plain text format. (Nobody's going to look through your html code in their plain text mail reader to look for the url they have to copy and paste into a browser to access your web app that lets them change their email preferences to read your future marketing emails. They probably consider their time at least as valuable as yours.)