Want Your Email Marketing to Be More Interactive? Consider Going Plain Text.

In an alternate universe where ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was written about digital marketing, the expression ‘With every new Mailchimp account, an overly designed HTML email gets sent’ would be commonplace.

Ok… maybe it’d be a bit catchier than that.

But, the sentiment still stands: spending your valuable time designing HTML marketing emails might be a waste of your valuable time.

Sound backwards? Believe it or not, plain text emails are the most interactive form of email marketing in your arsenal.

Let’s take a step away from how uninteresting plain text looks and think more about consumer psychology (influenced by ‘The Boron Letters’).

Imagine you’re holding two letters from your mailbox:

1. A beautiful brochure from Lowes offering a 20% Easter discount.
2. An envelope from Lowes addressed to you.

Which do you toss in the shredder? Which do you keep?

The same logic applies with email marketing. Your audience is much more likely to both open and interact with your emails when they appear to be more personal.

It’s for reasoning like this that companies like Drift still roll with plain-text.

In fact, when Hubspot performed an A/B test comparing open-rates for the two, they found:

• A 37% decrease in opens when adding GIFs to emails
• A 25% overall lower open rate using HTML instead of plain text
• A 23% decrease in open rate when adding more HTML content (images, social sharing, ect.) to a text-based HTML template

👍 Nice job, plain-text.

So, if you’re ready to make your email marketing more interactive, give plain text a shot before trying any HTML tricks.

You might be surprised by the results.

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Thanks for reading. For more like this, join me over at interactweekly.com where I share a new write-up on interactive marketing every Tuesday.

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source https://www.reddit.com/r/Emailmarketing/comments/g1vjwa/want_your_email_marketing_to_be_more_interactive/