73. Should I use HTML or plain text-based emails?
It depends on the email campaign. In general, you should have multiple branded email template designs. So, you have a design template for your newsletters, announcements, sales offers, etc. Make sure to A/B test your different email campaign designs and keep the ones that work best. An email marketing campaign that presents products needs to be multimedia and display large product images, stylized fonts, buttons with hyperlinks, etc. while an announcement or reminder email can be simple plain text. As a general rule, strip down your emails as much as you can without compromising the campaign effectiveness. You need to make readers that just skim through or only look at the email without reading it at all understand what it's about at a glance and understand which action you want them to take. That means you should have a call-to-action that somehow stands out from the rest of the text. Using short paragraphs, bulleted lists, bold, italicized or underlined text, or punctuation, can make key points in your emails stand out enough not to have to use fancy HTML. In most cases, you can have very effective campaigns with high open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates that are kept very simple with just plain text.
