[signal11]

An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default.

Why not have just text in paragraphs with hyperlinks? It'd force you to write good copy, sure, but also it's more likely it'll get read.

A complex layout often detracts from your message. Especially now with web-based clients implementing 'dark mode' and darkening your layouts, meaning you have less control over what the end-user sees.

(Apologies if this is off-topic. I don't mean to denigrate the work designers do, I just feel it's more appropriate on the actual web rather than in email.)

[onion2k]

You're talking about optimization. In your opinion emails with fancy layout and "on-brand" design will get a lower level of engagement than plain text with well-written copy. You may well be right (in a lot of cases.)

But you don't know that.

It's a guess based on your biases and assumptions. This is why it's critically important to measure things when you optimize them. Believing that you should engage with your customers in a way that you like because "they're just like me, so they'll like what I like" is an easy way to kill your messaging dead. Optimization of something like email is a matter of constantly measuring, refining, and measuring again.

[buro9]

What I do know from measuring my marketing and transactional emails is that the least possible formatting results in the lowest probability that I end up in the spam folder.

The hypothesis I had here (unverified) is that using a tool to produce email makes your email look like spam produced by that tool (by other people). My hypothesis more specifically is that spam detection software weighs similarity in the structure equally to similarity in content.

My HTML emails have since been modified to be absolutely minimal HTML as hints to the layout and nothing else. They are more like plain text emails that have been polished with just the lightest sprinkle of HTML and CSS but nothing more.

The result of keeping things simple is that my deliverability is over 99% and the open rate also phenomenally high.

[aarondia]

When I receive an html email, I default to thinking there is nothing of value in it, and I don't read it. I use email as a more formal text messaging, or often group text messaging, system. Marketing newsletters, etc are just a clutter. But I do get a lot of them, so maybe they work for others.

[andrei_says_]

Are you aware of any studies verifying this hypothesis? Would be very useful in my team’s roadmap.

[citrin_ru]

Spammers sometimes (often enough to bother) are trying to fool spam filters by adding invisible or hard to see text copied from ham messages (e. g. it allows to bypass Bayes). To counter this spamfilters are trying detect and penalize invisible text in HTML emails e. g. <span style="font-size: 0px;">....</span>, display:none, text with the same color as background, e. t. c.

Running something like headless browser (Chrome) to parse HTML emails would require too much resources so spam filters use either simple ad-hock HTML parsers or just regexps. If you use complex HTML markup, e. g. lots of nested div/span tags, different CSS styles on different levels and global <style> block on top of all, they can be confused and will detect invisible text in a message where all text is visible (when CSS/HTML is rendered in Google Chrome; who knows how it would look in different mail clients).

If you use clean and simple HTML, there will be no leftovers like <span style="font-size: 0px;"> and you will not confuse spam filters.

[andrei_says_]

Ironically <span style="font-size: 0px;"> is a must for spacing tables if you want outlook compatibility.

[citrin_ru]

Ironically this technique was used in phishing for MS Office 365 credentials (users of which often use MS Outlook): https://www.avanan.com/blog/zerofont-phishing-attack

Rendering in Outlooks changes from time to time - it is worth to check if this workaround is still required.

[contravariant]

Normally you'd think the burden of proof would be on the side requesting considerable resources and infrastructure to send something that doesn't render properly under the most basic privacy settings and cannot be displayed text-only (like in notifications).

[passivate]

Normally I would agree with this sentiment, but what kind of proof are you looking for here? We're not discussing logical absolutes or claims of absolute fact! We're discussing peoples preferences - what they like and/or expect an engaging email to look like. This area is highly subjective and contextual (culture, region, age, demo, etc). Neither your nor OPs experiences invalidate each other. Both of you can be correct at the same time.

Personally, I've seen engagement metrics increase when marketing added more "fluff" to their emails. Its no different than those obnoxious thumbnails people use on YT - it works - maybe accidentally, but it does, for now. That may change at any time in the future, just like what people like to see in emails/magazines/brochures is bound to change in the future.

[contravariant]

Sure if you just prefer if your emails look a certain way then there's no point in discussing proof, just do the thing you like.

However if the discussion is whether you should just send plaintext emails or use a complicated and/or expensive tool to send out fancy emails then the more time/money consuming side has more to prove.

Given that the first few replies I got were essentially "Well I assume somebody checked this", I'm not sure the assumption that fancier emails are necessarily better has been questioned enough.

I'm also reminded of several articles where online marketing itself turned out to be nowhere near as effective as people think. [1,2]

[1]: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873

[passivate]

>However if the discussion is whether you should just send plaintext emails or use a complicated and/or expensive tool to send out fancy emails then the more time/money consuming side has more to prove.

I am curious, how many plaintext emails do you receive as a percentage? I don't receive any so maybe my opinion is colored by that fact.

>Given that the first few replies I got were essentially "Well I assume somebody checked this", I'm not sure the assumption that fancier emails are necessarily better has been questioned enough.

I'm 100% with you that conventional wisdom should attract scrutiny from time to time, and I don't mean to discourage that. My only point was that there is nothing to "prove" here. Marketing styles/trends/methods are not linked so neatly and linearly that we can test individual elements by scientific method. There are far too many variables. I think it is natural that each company wants to be able to choose the font, add graphics to make the email attractive, add tracking pixels to measure performance, etc. Its sort of become the default. So maybe the question really is what do you stand to gain by removing all that?

>I'm also reminded of several articles where online marketing itself turned out to be nowhere near as effective as people think. [1,2]

Heh, maybe marketing was never as effective as people claimed, its that now we have the tools & metrics to detect just how bad it is. :)

[anamexis]

I would assume that side has, in fact, established that proof.

[TrueDuality]

I'm also going to make a pretty big assumption, which is that a lot of people using mailing tools that give them stats such as MailChimp do not think about how privacy settings affect their metrics. If I have images disabled by default I will almost certainly never show up in an "opened" metric.

Images off by default is becoming more common.

[contravariant]

It's a common assumption, but also a dangerous assumption when the people who you assume have established the proof are the same people who stand to profit a from it being proven.

[anamexis]

I'm not sure I follow - if marketers proved that plain text emails are more profitable, they would use plain text emails.

[hedora]

They certainly haven’t proven its efficacy to the people whose resources are being consumed.

[3np]

I hope you’re not suggesting inserting and relying on tracking pixels and other unreliable junk into outgoing emails in order to measure.

Besides, guess what, many times, “engagement” is precisely what I don’t want to be coerced or manipulated into doing.

Cursing while clicking around your funneling website to find a place to do a GDPR data delete request and eventually giving up while filing your sender as spam also counts as engagement. Whereas plaintext email is way less likely to trigger that response.

[linsomniac]

As someone who spent a very long time in a text-only mail client, on purpose, and then switched to Thunderbird and set it to the "show the text version if at all possible" mode, I'll say that I've become ambivalent about it.

Now actually appreciate being able to scan emails based on the 10,000 ft view. Sometimes, images can convey a lot in a glance, the overall graphical layout can convey a lot too.

[heroic]

Almost always, for such emails, you are not the audience. We've done multiple tests to check which emails perform better for our customers, and always ones with a lot more visual imagery, heavily HTMLized emails work better than just text and links.

Our understanding for this has been that people are not very email savvy, and for them the visual imagery works more like story telling.

[Seirdy]

What were the privacy implications of these tests?

Did your findings that email-savvy users were insignificant account for the fact that this subset of users probably disabled any email tracking in the first place?

I'm finding that technical users are excluded by corporate interests increasingly often. I suppose this might be a good thing, but I still find the underlying attitudes towards them frustrating.

[woodruffw]

I'm definitely not the intended audience for these emails, but as anecdata: whenever I get a flashy HTML email, a breaker trips in my brain and I immediately switch to "hunt for the unsubscribe button" mode. It's a good thing that I can't unsubscribe from my power company's alert emails, because I would have.

[krsdcbl]

I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Personally I very much share your purist view here, BUT i also find barely formatted plain text marketing emails highly suspicious and tend to filter them out as scam subconsciously.

Don't overload your communication, that is right. But also don't neglect your design and branding.

It's easy to think plain text is better when coming from a technical background with probably well maintained inbox, but your average customer has likely an inbox overflowing with marketing stuff already and will need visual hooks, proper presentation and coherence in appearance to decide if something is trustworthy and worth being read.

[Seirdy]

Plain text or unformatted email, in my experience, is more likely to have come from an actual person who genuinely wants to send me something. Heavily formatted emails optimized for user manipulation ("engagement") are typically sent by marketing departments who want to sell me something and can be safely discarded and added to my killfile.

I typically recommend all my friends to do the same, and many of them already do. How do you think most people react when they see a banner saying "Would you like to load remote images? [yes] [no]"?

[adkadskhj]

Heh, even further than that, they're broken right out of the gate for some people - like me. I don't display any images in my emails. I don't want them using that to track my view of the content. Yea some email providers work around this, but some don't - i have it fully disabled.

Most emails i view these days look like garbage.

[tootie]

You're not the average consumer probably. That or you don't even realize how a well-deaigned email can grab your attention.

[alpaca128]

You're probably not a user of the average PC and internet connection out there. On low-tier equipment well-designed can turn very quickly into utterly frustrating.

But you are right about the last part...when the user's UI locks up for a few seconds your email is certain to grab their attention. Just not in the way your carefully designed newsletter was intended to be remembered, though.

Plain text mails work better in every possible situation and are guaranteed to be formatted in a readable way. Meanwhile your average marketing newsletter is almost guaranteed to not be displayed in the correct manner as most decent email clients will just outright block any image content by default, and if your designer had the bright idea to also embed all text in images so their carefully selected font looks nice everywhere, well, I can't see anything without manually enabling pictures and then waiting 5+ seconds to see what the email is even about. And why would I do that?

[Cederfjard]

Not to be overly cynical, but are people with low-tier equipment the ones that marketers usually care about?

It’s not really about what ”works best” for the average recipient, because these emails are not sent out of the goodness of the senders’ hearts. If data show that fancy HTML emails translate into more paying customers, then that’s what drives these decisions.

It’s of course possible that this is not the case, however to be convinced of that I’d like to see the stats rather than speculation based on individual people’s subjective experience. And naturally it can depend on the product and target demographics, too.

[munk-a]

> Not to be overly cynical, but are people with low-tier equipment the ones that marketers usually care about?

Yes - they generally are. Sure the newest SV ETL pipeline might be catered towards folks with up-to-date hardware, but most marketing is directed toward having a large reach and you'll find that the distribution of gullible people is pretty even society wide - and so those low performance having folk actually do compose a fair chunk of the intended audience.

[Nextgrid]

I don't like the argument about not being the "average consumer". Just because you're smarter at detecting & filtering out marketer's bullshit doesn't make it okay to keep perpetuating the problem because others aren't.

If you deem the behavior nefarious or annoying it's not fair to justify inflicting it on someone else because they're not savvy enough to recognize/filter it.

[tootie]

It does though. Email marketing is all about crafting a message that gets the highest conversion rate and the rates are already pretty low. So if a blinking gif annoys most of your users, but the response rate goes from 3% to 4% it's a win for the sender.

[mrtksn]

Don't think transactional e-mail like "your order has been dispatched", imagine "You are invited to our annual conference", "We miss you, here is a %50 discount coupon for your next order!", "You have been accepted to our beta program" or "Unfortunately your application has been rejected" kind of e-mails.

When there's an e-mail about something special(in a sense that it's not happening all the time), I tend find it suspicious if it is not well formatted. If it's going to make me happy, better be formatted happy and if it is going to make me sad better looks like making me sad was taken seriously.

[amitheonlyone]

I don't completely agree with your opinion. It's true that emails that are crowded with styled elements are not ideal. But I feel that there is a sweet spot where you have nicely formatted and designed emails that look and communicate pretty well.

[bartvk]

It's not just web-based clients that implement dark mode, macOS Mail also does this. That's why I was a bit disappointed to see "background-color: #ffffff" in the screenshot.

[angry-tempest]

Great points but email is the easiest thing to A/B test in the world. If you were correct, somebody would have figured it out by now.

[boffinism]

They did: https://www.litmus.com/blog/the-results-are-in-a-b-testing-h...