With every day that goes by, I see increasingly fancy HTML emails in my inbox. My daily blog feeds are often extolling the virtues of the latest trend in design: horizontal scrolling, animated graphics, working search forms – the list goes on. But in this HTML maelstrom we seem to have forgotten the humble text-only email – you know, just like the ones we write to our friends and colleagues every day!

Our sister company here, the full-service agency Facultas [www.facultas.co.uk], has been deploying a programme of sending follow-up emails in text format to recipients who don’t open the original HTML communication. The content is generally a simple repetition of the offer – and we don’t include any kind of ‘Big Brother’ wording to suggest that we’re emailing them because they didn’t open. We send it as text only - and in ListManager we have to remember to turn off open tracking so that an HTML part doesn’t get created – and we track the clickthrough links within the message so we can measure the results.

On every occasion, we receive an additional 5% unique clickthroughs which represents a significant increase on the campaign as a whole. We obviously don’t email anyone who has unsubscribed or complained – and we set up the system so that we don’t send to people who had a hard bounce on the first mailing – but otherwise the process is pretty easy and requires very little effort.

I believe that text-only emails should remain an important element in any email marketer’s toolbox. Not only do they better meet the needs of those who prefer to receive messages in text format or who disable images, but they are also important for reaching the growing population of mobile device readers.  Furthermore, they’re great if you want to impart information quickly – and ironically, they can often have great stand-out in the inbox simply because they look different from all the other fancy designs with which we deluge our customers. 

For more information and tips about creating text-only email messages, please refer to these other useful resources here on lyrishq.com:

• Designing for the Mobile Device
• Mobile Email Marketing Tips
• Power Up Your Snippet Text
• Preheader Snippet Text - Use It!
• Creating Messages for PDA Readers
• Crafting a Compelling Text Message
• Email Subject Lines: 15 Rules to Write Them Right

So do text-only email messages work for you? We’d be very interested to hear your experience!

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Kieran Cooper is the General Manager of Lyris UK.  After a degree in music, Kieran began his career as a marketing manager for some of the most prestigious UK arts organisations including the Aldeburgh Festival and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra where he led the way in the use of CRM data for direct marketing, in the days before the Internet was invented. After a spell running his own management consultancy, he joined Lyris UK to work alongside Andrew Robinson acting as Lyris' UK presence. These days his job involves everything from sales and account management to implementation projects and support for the 250 Lyris customers in the UK and Europe.

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