Electronic Newsletters – HTML vs. Plain Text?

Posted in newsletter, opinion on 19 June 2009

The visual impact of having a HTML-based newsletter is clear but should you consider a plain text version instead? I think there are 4 options to consider when it comes to sending an electronic newsletter:

1) HTML version to your inbox.
2) Plain text version to your inbox.
3) A combination of 1 & 2.
4) Drop the electronic newsletter altogether and focus on social media!

Case study:

Earlier this year I was faced with this dilemma at work, when looking at how to improve the readership of our electronic newsletter, The Sauce.

The newsletter in question has a captive audience, Oxford Brookes students. The majority of which have signed up to receive the newsletter to their student email address directly or have it forwarded elsewhere. Since the first edition it had been sent out as HTML, which often arrived in the student’s inbox broken. This was either because students were checking their email via the online web mail system, or because their email clients and providers such as Google, Yahoo Hotmail and co, don’t display images by default. So on it’s arrival into the inbox it was appearing without images and the pretty HTML formatting making it look a mess! I felt this was an immediate turn off our readers and a rethink was necessary.

The only other ‘to your inbox’ approach to consider was a plain text version. As our newsletter is up to 3/4 sides of A4 in length having this as a long scrolling email is just not going to work with students, especially for stories in the bottom half of the newsletter.

Therefore my solution was to come up with a compromise – a plain text version of the newsletter with a link to the HTML version online. This got round the lack of support for displaying images in email clients and browsers, yet allowed us to maintain the visual styling we required. And on top of that, it allowed us to develop a standards compliant newsletter, unlike the typical ‘to your inbox’ HTML newsletters, which are tables-based and therefore not read by screen readers.

Throughout this process I was still left with the nagging thought at the back of my mind whether newsletters are not a bit out of date, in this social media driven online world?

Although Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools have a mass following they are very restrictive in terms or customisation, flexibility and don’t permit (much) commercial activity.

So they are not really a viable alternative in my case but perhaps for social groups or sports teams which don’t have a marketing focus, they are likely to be a better tool at engaging with their target audience and replace the traditional electronic newsletter.