Making e-mail plain enough

Following is Issue 35 of The Sensible Internet Design Letter [ archive | subscribe ].

Making e-mail plain enough

A popular consulting site drops plain-text e-newsletters ... and just might wind up a little less popular.

Note: TSIDL is back after a scheduled two-week hiatus. Thanks for welcoming me back into your ever-stuffed In boxes! - JS

Debbie Weil, author and publisher of the WordBiz Report, sent out her periodic e-newsletter today with an announcement:

She's discontinuing the plain text version of the e-newsletter. From now on, subscribers choose between HTML e-mail or a plain text mail that contains only a link to the HTML version on the Web.

Why? Here's what she says in her "Open Letter to WordBiz 'Texties'":

"I'm not providing a public service. Publishing issue after issue is a huge amount of work. I've got to show a measurable return, whether it's increased ad revenues, more leads or more sales. Much as I hate to say this, many of you -- texties, that is -- are not as responsive. You don't click through for the whole story. You don't click as frequently on the sponsor ads. You don't buy nearly as many e-reports ..."

I like Weil's newsletter and the Web site behind it. She focuses on effective writing and editing for the Internet. And she has both the wordsmithing and business credentials to back what she's saying, even if I might not always agree.

This is one case where I don't agree, though I subscribe to her HTML edition anyway so it's no skin off my nose. I just happen to think it's critically important to use all available design methods to optimize e-mail delivery opportunities.

Here's why:

• We just learned that more than 40 percent of all e-mail traffic is spam -- unsolicited commercial messages. That percentage is growing, possibly to 50 percent by the end of this year at the current rate.
• Spam puts successful delivery of legitimate e-mail messages at risk. We already know that the measures used to fight spam include imperfect filters that sometimes miss spam but, more to the point, sometimes catch and set aside non-spam messages. So designers and writers of e-mail newsletters and opt-in marketing messages have to find ways to keep their e-periodicals from looking like spam, either to computer programs or to humans scouring their In boxes.
• Even discounting spam, we're due for a crush of virtual letters. Late last year, research firm IDC predicted more than 60 billion e-mail messages would be sent in 2006, almost twice the 31 billion sent in 2002. IDC figured about half those messages sent in 2006 would be "person-to-person" e-mail, suggesting something other than spam.

I talk a lot about signal-to-noise ratio in Internet design. With 60 billion messages worth of noise out there, how's your signal going to get through to the largest possible audience? One way is to offer the message formatted the way people wish to receive it.

Regardless of what format people say they prefer, or what their e-mail software will support, when given a choice of HTML or plain text delivery 15 to 25 percent of list subscribers choose plain text. I've observed this on my own list and others I have managed. Even as HTML-ready e-mail software moved up to high-90-percent market penetration, the plain text preference stayed relatively constant.

It won't matter to software filters, but where people are judging between legitimate e-mail and spam, a cleanly formatted plain text message can actually stand out. It's especially true in an In box filled with HTML-formatted spam, laden with characteristically garish graphics.

I understand Weil's reasons for discontinuing the plain-text newsletter. Offering two versions is more work. It takes more time and effort to "deformat" text written to be distributed as HTML. That may sound like something you could automate, but not fully, especially not if your newsletter content includes extensive contextual hyperlinks.

(For what it's worth, it takes me about 10 extra minutes each week to spin the plain-text version of this letter out of the HTML version, mostly by hand.)

It's easier, and can be automatically formatted, if the letter is simply a list of headline-teasers and links. Even then, someone has to write the script to parse that content for both forms of delivery. The decision on whether to do that should be purely based on return on investment. In some cases, I suspect, automation programs are written at a much higher cost than required to have a human being do the work by hand.

The heart of the argument is this: Weil says she doesn't get as good a return on investment from plain-text newsletter subscribers. In terms of direct interaction with her e-commerce and e-service sites, maybe so. Still, for any service business that relies on word-of-mouth, almost all attention is good attention. It's impossible to measure in full the value of plain-text subscribers who might be sending third-party referrals or simply enticing friends to sign up.

It's a good bet that most of Weil's plain-text subscribers will switch to the HTML version if that's all they can get. But she'll lose a few folks from her list of 12,000 or so -- enough to matter -- and may irritate still more. I do have one friendly tip for her (and anyone else making a similar change):

If you're halting the plain text version, you should probably remove the "text" choice from the newsletter sign-up box.