There’s no doubt that it works, but are plain text emails the answer for your brand or business?

I have just taken part in a webinar on how to market a webinar. It was a piece of content marketing aimed at content marketers.

The online event was run by ON24 and titled ‘Unlocking the Secrets to Driving Webinar Registration’. The presenter, Mark Bornstein, lives and breathes webinars and certainly knew his stuff. He was using a webinar to promote a webinar service just as this post is using content marketing to promote a content marketing service. Did I mind? Hell no – the content he shared was thought provoking and insightful. Some of it I knew already, but some of it made me look at things from a fresh perspective.

Bornstein told us how to market a webinar by showing how he had marketed the webinar we were all taking part in. He shared not just the strategy but the actual emails, their frequency and the click-through rates achieved. The main takeaway was ‘try to connect at lots of times and in lots of ways, and keep testing’.

One of things that Bornstein was particularly evangelical about was plain text emails. These are emails without the fancy formatting and images that normally feature on marketing emails and newsletters. They look plain and just contain text – like the emails that you exchange with colleagues and contacts everyday, and that’s the point.

We are all faced with a daily barrage of emails and are becomingly increasingly adept at filtering the important from the unwanted. As soon as you see a colourful banner and some bold persuasive text you know that this isn’t an order from a customer, an instruction from your boss or a juicy bit of gossip from Jane in accounts. You may well delete it without reading a word.

Plain text emails prevent you from making these immediate presumptions. You have to read the body of the email to see what it’s all about. The advice from ON24 was to keep it personal, to address people by their first names and to use ‘I’ and ‘you’ to suggest that a relationship already exists.

The objective is for the email to feel like a personal note between two contacts sharing some useful information – that a webinar is taking place that could be worth attending. No hard sell. No bombardment of bullet points.

It was at this point that Bornstein cautioned against sending such emails from one’s own email address. This was because the sender would not want to be bombarded by requests for more information – and also because they would not want to be the direct recipient of the angry replies that inevitably follow such plain text emails.

Bornstein explained that one enraged correspondent had called him a ‘creep’, presumably feeling that the email was somehow deceitful, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Bornstein laughed this off and admitted being caught out by such plain text trickery (my phrase) himself. He didn’t seem concerned and you could see why. More people had clicked through to register from the plain text email than from any other html email or other marketing channel. The communication that took the least effort had produced the greatest result.

So, should you incorporate plain text emails as part of your content marketing strategy? The success of the ON24 example is compelling, though it’s possible that the timing and the message had been more important than style of email. Only testing could tell us that.

And testing is undoubtedly the answer. Test with stakeholders, internal and external, and try and get qualitative as well as quantitative feedback. Try it on the market with some straight A-B testing and see what works. Then pause and give it some long hard thought. Will plain text emails undermine your brand and the trust you have worked hard to build with customers and prospects?

Of course there are degrees of ‘deception’ when it comes to plain text email, and we must all meet our commercial goals, balancing the short- and long-term rewards. But content marketing is largely about customer trust and we risk losing it at our peril.