Choosing between rich text and plain text for email marketing can be a difficult decision, but it is one that needs to be made. There are few things in the modern world more frustrating than getting an email with no formatting whatsoever. Rich text emails offer many benefits to businesses, so this article will discuss how they work and why you should use them.
You may be wondering what the best email format to use for your company’s marketing is.
The answer of course depends on what you need. If you are looking for advanced functionality with unlimited styling options, including colorful fonts and fancy digital signatures, then HTML format would work best.
If you are looking for more limited features like style adjustments in italics or bolding, use Rich Text formatting when possible.
Lastly, if all that’s needed is text alone without such an array of benefits one can also use Plain Text formatting which produces simple text as a result.
Plain-text emails are great for times when you want to get right to the point. They’re often used in transactional email, like receipts or order confirmations, because they work well with mobile devices and people can read them quickly without having to download an app that supports rich text formatting. Plain-text emails have been shown time again to be more effective than HTML ones at increasing open rates so if your goals are primarily conversion oriented then this format could be a good choice.
However, there is one major drawback of using plain text – it doesn’t allow any images! Rich Text allows marketers more control over how their message looks through things such as fonts, colors and spacing which means they can create messages that are much more pleasant to look at.
Plain text contains no formatting, only line breaks and spacing. This means that it is difficult to make a table of contents, indent paragraphs or set off headings.
Rich text can also be more effective at increasing conversions since we can use things like fonts and colors which makes the message look better and causes people to read more.
What is Rich Text Format used for?
Rich text is a popular default format for the creation of emails. It allows formatting options such as fonts, colors and spacing which means they can create messages that are much more pleasant to look at. Plain text contains no formatting, only line breaks and spacing. This means that it is difficult to make a table of contents or indent paragraphs in plain text; however this also helps with email deliverability since HTML looks like spam filters may see it differently than an inbox due to its curly brackets and embedded images. Rich Text Format (RTF), provides support for things like font sizes, colors, paragraph alignment etc which makes the message look better and causes people to read more so you have higher chances of conversions because your target audience will understand what you want to say.
Formatting is important in any type of marketing email, but it’s especially true when you’re delivering your message on mobile. Mobile users tend to open emails more quickly than desktop computers. Rich text formatting can help make a company’s campaign pop and draw the attention of potential customers looking for what they need or want.
What About HTML?
The most popular email format is rich text, especially when using professional email signatures. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and it’s the coding language used by all webpages on the internet (including this one). Whenever you go to any webpage, it’s coded in HTML.
Similarly, emails created using the traditional email clients such as Outlook, Apple Mail and Gmail by default will use HTML.
An important thing to remember is that not all email clients render HTML in the same way. For example, Outlook uses the Word Rendering Engine, Apple Mail uses the Webkit rendering engine, and Mailbird uses the Chromium rendering engine. This means when you send an email in HTML format from one of these to another, it might look different depending on which client is being used.
Why is Rich Text Format the right choice for many marketers?
Rich text format allows a marketer to create engaging emails that will be more appealing to look at over plain-text versions which can end up looking like spam messages with big blocks of paragraphs crammed together on one line without any space between them. It also offers much more formatting control than HTML does which means you don’t have as little freedom in the presentation of your message.
The Benefits of Plain Text Files
You don’t need special software or tools to open a plain text file. This can be really annoying for some types of files, as those who have tried to open an old .docx file on older versions of Microsoft Word might realize.
Computers with lower specs, or older versions of word processors may experience slowness when processing large documents with tables, images and macros.Plain text files may not include advanced features found in rich text files, but because of this they can be opened rapidly and without hassle.
Lots of people choose text files to make simple notes because it is such a simple format. In decades time it is almost certain that text files will still be readable.
Plain text format is made up of people typing the message out and saving it as a .txt file so there’s no special formatting at all which means everything will stay uniform throughout every sentence without any spacing changes or font sizes being adjusted. The only benefit this has over rich text would be that plain text emails
Text files are made up of characters that are typed in one line and then saved to a file. Text files can be opened by many different applications, like Notepad on PCs or TextEdit for Macs.
