Plain-text Email

Don’t forget your plain-text email! You need it for people who can’t (or won’t) view
HTML. Sometimes, the plain-text version of your email is the one that gets displayed if
your recipient checks his email on his mobile device.
If you don’t take the time to create the plain-text version of your HTML email, you’ll just
look like a lazy spammer (spam filters will penalize you for only sending HTML). When
you send a campaign in MailChimp, you’ll need to create both versions of your message
(HTML & Plain-text). Then we “bundle” them together in “multipart format” and send
them off. Your recipients’ email applications then decide which version to display.
The Art of Plain-text email
There’s definitely an art to constructing your plain-text email. You can’t just use the
same text from your HTML email. It has to be formatted juuuust right, so the best way
to do it is to build it from scratch, or copy-paste the content from your HTML email, then
reformat it heavily.
Here are some tips for your plain-text emails:
1. Use a plain text editor, like TextWrangler for the Mac, or Windows NotePad.
Don’t use something like Microsoft Word, because it won’t give you the kind of
“raw” text files you need. You need an application that gives no formatting
whatsoever.
2. If you’re using MailChimp, create a plain-text message in your text editor, then
simply copy-paste it into the “plain text message” field in MailChimp. No
uploading required. Or, you can just type straight into MailChimp’s interface.
One thing I like to do is pop-up preview my HTML email, highlight all my content,
then paste it into the plain-text field in MailChimp. Then, I go and reformat
everything.
3. By default, some email applications start to wrap your plain-text messages at
about 60 characters or so. That’s not really a big deal to most people. Just let
your text wrap wherever their email programs want it to. But if you have content
that you absolutely do not want to wrap unexpectedly (like in the middle of a
hyperlink), one nice little trick is to type a letter 60 times across the top of your
message, and use that as your visual “ruler.” As your content approaches the end
of that ruler, hit your return key and “hard wrap” the line. Again, this is only if you want very strict formatting. These days, I let my plain-text emails just wrap
fluidly.
4. People don’t read email. They scan email. Especially plain-text email. So make it
really easy to find important information with bullet points and visual markers
(see screenshot below)
5. You can’t code a clickable link with plain-text email. You just have to type out
the entire URL. Some email applications will make it clickable automatically.
Some won’t.
One thing we’ve noticed is that a lot of people spend so much of their time on the HTML
version of their message, they’re too “drained” to work on their plain-text email (we’re
guilty of that ourselves). So they either ignore it, or they slap some junk in, or they
“cheat” a little, and type in something like, “Evidently, you can’t view HTML email, so
visit this URL in your browser to see our newsletter in all its glory.” We think this is a big
mistake. So don’t put all your energy into the HTML version of your email. Save some
love for your plain-text message too. If you find yourself spending so much time coding HTML that you’re too pooped to make a plain-text email, you should consider setting up
one re-usable template that you can just select, and “fill with content” every campaign.
No need to reinvent the wheel for every campaign.