Our promotional emails follow our guiding principle: move fast. We respect that time is finite and work to save our customers and our team time so they can do more interesting things.
Graphical promotional emails can be time consuming to both read and create. They're only sent once so it's hard to tell if there's upside to styling. Over the years, we repeatedly tested plain text promotional emails versus stylized promotional emails and text always wins.
Consequently, we don't waste time continuing to run this experiment. Consider the following:
Text only emails are quick to create
Providing you're a reasonably good writer, it's faster to write than to design a graphical email.
Text only emails are quick to style
Text only emails require some styling in terms of paragraph and link structure to be easy to act on but they require far less time to design than a graphical email.
Text only emails are quick to read
A well written text only email is far quicker to read and understand than most graphical emails.
Text only emails are quick to act on
A well written and designed text only email is far quicker for customers to act on them graphical emails.
Of course, these are only true if you write well and omit needless words. People don't want to spend precious time reading nonsense so we always get right to the point and, if possible, we may insert a joke as an added bonus.
We do stylize transactional emails as they're sent on an ongoing basis and a little style can help customers understand certain emails faster. For example, if you're scanning a complex order receipt email it's helpful a big button to access the invoice is designed as a call to action.
But, for 1-off promotional emails, there's little upside to trying to design an optimal style versus trying to simply write well. That's why we're going on 15 years writing text only promotional emails and plan to continue doing so.
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