Comments on: Formatting Email Newsletters – Should You use Plain Text or HTML?

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 19:22:50 +0000

I find using HTML with ONLY TEXT, results in
awesome results. Great for tracking as well.
Kinda best of both worlds I guess.

By: steven

steven — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 16:36:23 +0000

Hey Yaro;

I am about to start a newsletter and wasn’t too sure on which format to go with there and why that they weren’t like a regular email. Now I do. Thanks for the help and update.

By: Format Text Tool » Internet Business Blog | Entrepreneurs-Journey.com - by Yaro Starak

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 21:05:23 +0000

[...] If you are like me you send out email newsletters on a regular basis. I only use text based email newsletters and I always need to format the width by using character spacing restrictions. You can read why I do this in my article – Formatting Email Newsletters – Should You use Plain Text or HTML? [...]

By: Alborz Fallah

Alborz Fallah — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 01:41:44 +0000

Hmm handy article Yaro,

I am about to start a newsletter and wasn’t too sure on which format to go with there..

Hmm..

By: Yaro

Yaro — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 22:58:43 +0000

Ahh it’s good to have some people disagree with me!

I still stand by my call for plain text because I believe the numbers, at least for the time being, will be better AND talking about it from a solopreneur point of view, it’s a lot easier to prepare plain text. If you have the staff that can do HTML for you or you are proficient enough to do it time effectively then okay.

Hermann, I think it’s too soon to say that there you are safe to use HTML emails without concern for client compatibility. I get emails now that my mozilla email client can’t display properly (note that it’s usually SPAM of course).

Of course all this is moot, when it comes down to it you should try both and see which bring in a better response or wait for the experts to do all the testing for you and then adopt their best practices. Considering pretty much every newsletter I subscribe to from the so called experts in online marketing use plain text I’ll consider that a vote of confidence until things change.

By: Ronstaa

Ronstaa — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 10:18:46 +0000

Yaro go the HTML emails Im currently working on this type of email for my site. I personally love HTML emails. My two cents…

By: Hermann Klinke

Hermann Klinke — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 09:27:30 +0000

Hi Yaro, sorry, I have to disagree with you. I personally do not like plain text E-Mails, because they are so hard to read, because it’s just text and the formatting is missing. Look at this website, even very simple formattings such as headers and frames or borders make it a lot easier to digest content and to get an overview of the content. I can’t read a text only e-mail fast, because I have no orientation and hints on whether there is anything useful in that email without reading that entire e-mail. I also can’t stand inactive links, because they also make it harder to read since you usually don’t care what the url is, you just want to click on it and go there. I agree that you have to use HTML conservative though.
But using plain text because some e-mail clients may not support it is not a good point either. Come on, where do we live, in the 80′s? That’s like saving all of your files in 8.3 format, because *some* computer out there might not understand it.

By: Will

Will — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 03:02:16 +0000

Yaro, I agree with more or less everything you say above. We’ve always sent plain text emails for the reasons that – they’re much easier and a great deal more “personal”. However I’m beginning to wonder about HTML… It can handle a lot more “bells and whistles” and it does look pretty nice too…

At the moment I agree that text emails are still the way to go but the case for HTML seems to be strengthening as more and more people become familiar with, or even come to expect, that format.

In the meantime, I’ll definitely be using your text wrapping tool.

Will