Today I want to talk to you about why having beautifully designed emails, or newsletters might not be a good idea.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the beautiful B2C emails your favourite clothing brand or tourism destination send you do work (just ask my bank account).

But I’m talking about your B2B emails, the ones designed to raise awareness of your company, encourage customers to consider purchasing your product or service, and end in them making the decision to buy from you, not your competitors.

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Plain text emails have 18% higher click through rates compared to HTML emails..

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How are ‘beautiful’ emails hurting your business?

One. They don’t have focus.

The average ‘pretty’ email template has a lot going on. Columns, colours, sections, headlines and so on, all of which encourage us to include an array of messages, rather than what we should be including – one message that’s easy to understand.

Two. People aren’t even getting them.

When email providers see fancy HTML emails coming into inboxes, they’re more likely to filter it straight to ‘junk’, but plain text? Now that gets through, or more accurately its far more likely to get through.

Three. People aren’t even reading them.

Plain text emails have 18% higher click through rates compared to HTML emails.

This could be for a variety of reasons, but being aware that different email browsers, like Chrome vs. Internet Explorer and different devices like iPhones vs. desktop computers will show your email differently, and more often than not, they don’t come out as good as you’d like.

Why plain text is important

Plain text gives off a more casual and friendly image, much like if you’re sending an email to a friend. This is when you know you’re on a winner.

But that’s not to say the email should be bare – including images, video, text links and font styling help greatly in delivering the message.

Focusing on H2H, not B2B/B2C

Some of you may be seeing H2H and thinking “what the hell is that?”. As cliche as it may sound, Human to Human marketing is an important aspect to focus on when making your emails.

When writing human to human your emails should:

• Use a one-on-one tone that resonates with your customer
• Adopt an information, conversational tone
• Use spoken English, which means you should forget “grammatically correct!” and use Short, sharp sentences with one idea per sentence… Simple always trumps complex

If you can’t sit down and write each email individually, you’re like 99% of us. The next best option is to use merge tags. Starting with 犀利士
en-au/blog/create-personalised-emails-customers-actually-get-want-read”>“Hi Insert First Name” is a good place to start. And don’t just send the same email to everyone, make sure you’re fully aware of your customer personas and you segment your email campaigns accordingly.

Lastly, don’t forget to have a catchy subject line that is the most important part of your email, because there’s no point slaving away for hours crafting the most amazing email if no one’s tempted by the subject line to open it in the first place. To find out more about the best performing types of subject lines that you can use to increase conversions from your emails, check out our blog on Subject Lines – The Unsung Hero Of Email Marketing.

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