HTML and Plain Text E-mail Alternatives

Providing a plain-text alternative to an HTML e-mail message is a good business practice.

HTML e-mail messages are the standard for marketing e-mails, from newsletters to sale announcements. Yet for reasons ranging from image suppression to the use of mobile devices, providing a plain-text alternative for every HTML e-mail is essential if your message is to be readable by all recipients. A plain text e-mail may contain all of the essential features of a marketing message if properly planned.

Image alternatives

Since many recipients who do receive HTML images nonetheless can be expected to see image suppression turned on in their e-mail programs, and thus not see the images in your e-mails, most e-mail senders already have good "alt text" written for all the images in their e-mail. This descriptive text can be reused in place of images in a plain-text e-mail with some creative rewording.

Logo alternatives

The type of image that is hardest to find a replacement for in a plain-text e-mail is an organization's logo. It is such a vital part of an organization's visual branding that its absence is a problem in plain-text e-mails. Although the use of all caps is normally frowned upon in communication, placing the sending organization's name in all caps is an effective visual substitute for its logo in a plain-text e-mail.

Links

Many commercial e-mail service providers do a poor job with the clickable links in HTML e-mails when automatically generating the plain-text version of an e-mail message. When sending an e-mail using a provider, senders should doublecheck and clean up the links in every automatically generated plain-text e-mail to ensure that only the "http://" and the URL are included -- for instance, by removing brackets.

Paragraph spacing

Because many of the other aspects of e-mail layout and design that make text readable, such as control over font type and size, are not available when laying out a plain-text e-mail, it is essential to lay out the text very simply, with wide spacing between paragraphs, for high readability.

E-mail length

An e-mail newsletter that is long but readable when laid out in HTML becomes a thick block of text when laid out in plain text. E-mail messages that tend to be longer, such as a newsletter, should be written bearing in mind that many recipients will be reading them without the aids to readability that HTML provides. Length should be controlled accordingly, and the plain-text version of an e-mail should be checked for thoroughness before sending.

References

• Mail-List: Why Plain Text Emails are the Best on Today's Internet
• AWeber: How to Make Your Plain Text Emails Hard to Read and Use