Plain Text or Designed Newsletters

Two newsletters in the same inbox

One arrives with a banner across the top, three columns of photographs, coloured buttons and a coupon set inside a graphic. The other is a few paragraphs from the owner, signed with a first name.

The first looks like advertising, because it is built the way advertising is built. The second looks like a letter, and gets read like one.

Many small businesses ended up with the first by default. The email service offered templates, the templates looked professional, and nobody asked whether the readers wanted a brochure.

Neither style is right for everyone. But each has costs that are easy to miss from the sender's side of the screen.

What the designed version costs

• Images switched off by default in some programs, including Outlook on Windows.
• Words set inside images, which vanish when the images do not load.
• Layouts drawn by Word in desktop Outlook, which ignores much modern design code.
• Web fonts replaced by Times New Roman in some versions of Outlook.
• A promotional look that Gmail tends to file under its Promotions tab.

The second does the most damage, because the sender never sees it. Whoever designed the email sees every image; a reader at an office desk sees grey boxes where the event dates and the offer were.

The third explains many of the broken layouts people forward to each other. Outlook on Windows uses the same engine as Word to display email, so columns drift, backgrounds disappear and spacing changes.

What the plain version costs

Plain text has costs of its own, and they are worth knowing before switching.

A strictly plain-text email cannot show a product, a photograph of finished work or a logo. For a business whose customers buy what they see, that is a real loss.

It cannot record opens either, since opens are counted by a tiny image that loads when the email is read. Clicks still count, but tracked links can appear in full as long, untidy addresses.

And a letter that runs to two thousand words is no easier to read for being plain. The style suits short and specific, not everything the business did this quarter.

Who each one suits

The question is whether the reader needs to see something in order to act.

An accountant's update, a contractor's seasonal reminder or an adviser's note on a rule change does not. These readers know a person at the business, and a letter from that person is the most natural thing in their inbox.

A shop with new stock, a restaurant with a new menu or a gallery with a new show does need pictures, and a letter describing them in words is asking a lot of the reader.

Most businesses sit somewhere between, which is why the useful answer is usually a plain layout rather than plain text.

Plain layout, not plain text

An email can be built in HTML, the same code as a web page, and still look like a letter: one column, a small logo, live text, and a photograph only where it adds something.

Most email services send two versions in every message, a designed one and a plain-text one, and the reader's program shows whichever it can.

The plain version is usually generated automatically. Read it once, since it can contain stray image names and broken lines.

A plain layout keeps the personal tone and still allows the one photograph that sells the thing.

A worked example

A comedy club sent a weekly newsletter from a colourful template: a banner with the weekend's shows written into the image, then three columns of photographs of the comedians booked.

Several regulars read their email at work, in Outlook. For them the banner was a grey box, so the show times never arrived, and the columns collapsed into a long, uneven strip.

On phones the photographs shrank to the size of stamps, and the whole thing landed under Promotions alongside the big retailers' sale mailings.

The club rebuilt it as a single column: a short note from the owner in live text, the shows listed as text with dates and times, and three comedians, each with a name and a line underneath.

With images off, every date and name is still there. With images on, it looks like the club rather than a flyer.

A layout that survives everything

Whatever the style, a few rules keep a newsletter readable in every program.

One column, around 600 pixels wide, which reads on a phone without rearranging and on a desktop without stretching.

Live text for anything that matters: dates, prices, offers, addresses. Images illustrate; they never carry the only copy of a fact.

Alt text on every image, the short description that appears when the image does not. Buttons built from code rather than pictures, so they still appear and still work.

Fonts that are already on every computer, and one main link per item rather than five.

Test it where your readers are

The preview inside an email service is not how the newsletter will look in Outlook at a law office or on an older Android phone.

Send a test to the programs your customers actually use: Outlook on Windows, Gmail on a phone, Mail on an iPhone. Open one with images turned off.

Check the footer as well. Whatever the design, CASL requires each commercial email to say who sent it, give a postal address and one other way to make contact, and offer a working unsubscribe link, honoured inside ten business days.

The counter-case

Some designed newsletters work well and should stay as they are.

A retailer whose readers open the email to see what has arrived is right to show it, and a well-built template from a good email service handles most programs properly.

Plain letters have their own limit: they depend on somebody at the business having something worth saying, in their own voice, every time.

Match the style to what the reader needs to see, and build it so nothing important lives only in an image.

Before the next issue

1. Decide whether readers need pictures to act.
2. Move to a single column layout.
3. Put every date and price in live text.
4. Add alt text to each image.
5. Replace image buttons with coded ones.
6. Send a test to Outlook with images off.
7. Read the plain-text version once.

Step three is the one that matters most. A newsletter whose facts survive with images switched off works for every reader, whatever it looks like.

Keeping each issue readable after it is sent is covered in a newsletter archive on the website.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.