Email marketing increases the efficiency of your marketing, sales, and customer service. However, this only works if you know how to utilize it in the best possible ways. Successful email marketing campaigns depend heavily upon the way state-of-the-art technology is used.
Although email marketing makes digital marketing easy, it still remains one of the most complicated processes of managing marketing campaigns. It needs efficient brainstorming of the entire marketing team to bring out the best result. The key is knowing how and when to use email marketing to help your brands reach audiences at key decision-making moments.
It does not matter how advanced technology has transformed email marketing, the value of plain-text email can never be replaced. Useful and well-designed plain-text emails can never go wrong. Plain-text emails can gain higher achievements by implementing some best practices of the industry. Here are a few tips to help optimize plain-text emails.
Create Easy to Scan Content
Organizing email content in an easily scannable way is important to provide your subscribers with a positive email experience. The headline should serve as a clear indicator of the kind of content the primary focuses on. Larger text, different colors, and all caps can be used to separate headlines from the content. With the double-asterisk (**) next to each headline and a row of dashes underneath, the headers appear clearer, which makes the email easy to scan. Subscribers will not have clear readability without a defined headline in plain-text emails.
Add Whitespace
Another important element for scanning is the use of whitespace, which involves line breaks between different content sections and headlines that give readers space to breathe. It creates a clear path in the eyes of the subscriber, allowing links to be easily clickable and touch-friendly on mobile devices.
Create Points
Using lists is another great tactic for creating a hierarchy in a plain-text email. By using pointers in the email, the hierarchy of the content remains intact, despite the lack of fancy HTML elements.
Highlight CTAs
Plain-text emails also need CTAs that stand out so that your subscribers shouldn’t have to go looking for them. While it’s a bit more difficult to make CTAs stand out without the help of colorful HTML-based buttons, you can use two angle brackets (>>) to draw attention to the CTA.
Let the Lines Run Free
In the past, many email clients allowed the text to run extremely long before wrapping it on a new line. It was an industry best practice to add line breaks after every 60 characters in plain-text emails to increase legibility. With changing times and the flooding number of mobile email clients, text emails cannot run too long and they are being optimized to fit within the boundaries of the window, unlike the traditional way.
Besides the above-mentioned points, remember not to stuff your email with links. Keep in mind that the plain-text email needs to be easily readable and the calls to action are clear. Without HTML design elements like background colors, larger text for headlines, and imagery, you will need to use other elements to achieve readability. Use these tips in your next plain-text email and let us know how you did in the comments below!
