List Building - The Winning Email Marketing Message Format
If you’re involved in online marketing at all, you probably belong to several email mailing lists for marketers who sell products or services to people in the “IM” arena.
Think about the email messages you receive from those people. Do you see anything common about the format?
I would bet almost all of them are in plain text. No fancy HTML, no flashing graphics, just plain old words. That’s true for almost any successful email marketer out there. Why?
Think about the work required to create an email marketing message:
- You have to come up with what to say
- You have to write the words
- You have to format the email
The first two tasks are required no matter what email message format you use. But that formatting step can take virtually no time at all, or it can require hours of effort. The pros don’t want to spend hours, so they make the formatting step easier by using plain text.
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It is easier and quicker to create plain text emails for email marketing campaigns than it is to create HTML masterpieces. HTML is for websites, not emails. Leave the fancy stuff for your pages, and focus on putting compelling words in your email messages.
This helps you get your emails delivered, too. Lots of spam filters at the server level can flag HTML emails as spam. That means your painstakingly created work of art might never be seen by human eyes. Using plain text avoids at least part of this problem, although it does not immunize you against spam filters entirely.
Avoiding HTML also gives you an advantage in a recipient's email inbox. Many email clients can filter HTML emails, or not display the pretty HTML unless the user explicitly allows it. Putting HTML in your messages puts another speed bump in front of your reader. Why risk not getting read?
Many people who educate others about email marketing claim that the click-through rate (CTR) for HTML emails is higher than it is for plain text emails. That may be true, but only testing will tell you for sure.
But even if HTML gets more clicks, does that overcome the emails that do not get past spam filters? Does it compensate for annoying your subscribers by forcing them to allow HTML for your emails? Maybe not.
And here's something else most of these teachers tell you...if you send an HTML email, always include a plain text version, just in case the HTML version got stuck in the filters. Most autotresponder services have this feature. That means you will have to create two versions of your emails, which obviously requires extra work.
Why not skip the extra effort and potential hit to your email campaign effectiveness and use plain text emails? That's what the pros do.
Read more Email List Building articles.
Paul Ransom is a Google Adwords Management Consultant specializing in sales lead generation, email list building and landing page conversion rate improvement using A/B and multivariate split testing with Google Website Optimizer.
You can get Paul Ransom's free Google Adwords course on How To Avoid The 7 Most Costly Mistakes here.
