We swore an oath to use plain-text emails

And it has made all the difference.

At the beginning of 2016, we decided to go with plain-text emails over HTML. We believed that it reflects our product, Newton Mail — the cleanest, most zen email service in the market.

After 20 months, we are still sticking with plain-text emails. The reason? They just work.

During the email campaign for the recently launched Windows app, I realized how much we had simplified the ‘announcement newsletters’. They used to be HTML heavy, with fancy banners and ugly buttons. But, this email is so ‘human’ that you’ll find it hard to call it a ‘newsletter’.

It reminded me of my interview on Really Good Emails, in which I’ve shared strong inclination towards plain-text emails, and how it helped us give a more human touch to Newton.

It’s still relevant and thought I’d share it with our readers on Paper Planes.

Guion from RGE: How did you and your team first decide to switch to plain-text emails?

It was in December 2015. We were approaching our Mac app launch. I prepared the release checklist, and as part of it, we looked at our welcome email after almost a year. I hated it. It was such a dense HTML email!

I went to our UX lead to ‘fix’ it. We were discussing on how to change the theme. The whole theme of the release was to keep things simple and distraction-free, just like our Mac app. During the discussion, I said — “why don’t we have a simple, plain-text email? It goes well with what we are doing”. He nodded. “Also, less work for the design and the development team!” I said, tongue-in-cheek.

From then on, the way we looked at our email campaigns changed. All drip (life cycle) emailers are now plain-text. Our users loved it. The response rate to our emails went up by 156%. Even for our newsletters, we try to keep things simple with just one image.

Old (Early 2015):

This feels one-directional if your goal is to start a conversation.

Current:

Response rates for this are up 156% over the HTML version! That’s change we can believe in.

Can you talk about the “all emails being conversations” ethos a bit?

At Newton, we are user-centric and are known for providing exceptional customer support. For us, every user matters. Everyone at Newton, including our CEO, responds to the customer tickets. We want to talk to our users, hear what they have to say.

Email is the best source of communication for us, and hence we strive to make every email we send conversational. Here are a few things that we follow:

• We never send ‘No reply’ emails, even when we’ve to share the news with millions of our subscribers.
• We encourage users to reply to all our emails, newsletters included.
• We respond to all queries within a few minutes, even on holidays.

Here’s an example of an email we’ve sent to gather user feedback:

What have you found to be most valuable about your switch to plain-text email?

Better relations with the users. With a plain-text email, they know that they are talking to a human on the other end. It encourages them to reply more, share their thoughts/feedback freely. What’s more valuable to a young, growing company than their users’ feedback?

We discussed some types of businesses/email strategies that plain-text might not be preferable for (bank statements, sales promos, digests, etc). What’s an example of a time where you felt this tension for Newton (i.e. wanting to send an email campaign that could have really used HTML?)

There are a couple of instances: we ran a Thanksgiving offer, and another when we needed to share a lot of features as part of our new update. Even in such cases, where visual elements make your communication better, we try to keep things very simple. We either use a single, simple header image or convey the feature using of a GIF. We always stick to the simple/minimal nature of our brand.

Plain-text puts us right where we want to be: learning from our customers directly about how our product can serve them better.

If you could make your case for plain-text communication with customers using only one email from Newton’s last year, what would it be?

Our welcome email makes a strong case for plain-text emailers. But, let me better it.

There was a rare instance when one of our iOS updates started crashing for few users. We pushed an immediate fix, but still felt it was our responsibility to reach out to the users and offer an apology. And we did with this simple plain-text email:

We expected our users to abuse us, leave one-star reviews in the stores, and maybe leave us for our competitors. But, what followed is a different thing altogether: most of them only had kind words to say. Yes, the love for the product and the team behind it is the one reason they stuck with us. I’d also like to give credit to the no-nonsense, plain email we’ve sent them.

Plain-text puts us right where we want to be: learning from our customers directly about how our product can serve them better.

As a user, what do you prefer — simple, plain-text emails or HTML heavy emails?

👏 as hard as you can if you hate the HTML emails as much as we do :)