Plain text is a format you can choose to send your emails in. They work well for non-marketing-related content and can also give your emails a more personal feel.
Our app also creates a plain text email to send with HTML emails, in case a recipient’s email client only reads plain text.
Before you start
Here’s a few things you should know about plain text emails:
- You can’t control text size to make headings stand out, or emphasize words with bold, italic or colored fonts.
- It’s not possible to include images or use hyperlinks in plain text emails.
- Only basic reporting is available.
Create plain text emails
When setting up regular campaigns or journey emails, you’ll be prompted to “choose a starting point” to create your email. In the left sidebar, choose Plain text, then copy and paste, or type your content into the text area as shown in the image below:
To the right of the text area is a list of quick link tags you can use in your plain text emails:
[preferences] — Inserts a link to the subscriber’s preference center.[forwardtoafriend]— Inserts a link to the “forward to a friend” page.[webversion] — Inserts a link to the web version of the email.[unsubscribe] — Inserts an unsubscribe link, which is compulsory.[tweet] — Inserts a Twitter “Tweet” link.[fbshare] — Inserts a Facebook “Share” link.
When the email is sent, these tags are replaced with their respective personalized URLs. All you need to do is write some copy that explains what the link is for, then add the tag. For example:
Would your friends like this email? Why not foward it to them: [forwardtoafriend]
After the email is sent, the tag will be converted to look something like this:
Would your friends like this email? Why not forward it to them: http://abcwidgets.forwardtomyfriend.com/j-ilglkk-l-u
Plain text email reports
Only basic reporting is available for plain text campaigns. If you have access to view reports, you’ll get bounce rates and numbers for social sharing, unsubscribes and spam complaints, but no stats on clicks or opens.
No open or click stats
Clicks on links in a plain text email are not able to be tracked for campaign reporting. This is because URLs in plain text emails are text only, rather than hyperlinks.
Most modern email clients, such as Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook.com, detect URLs in plain text messages and automatically make them clickable to benefit recipients. But this is done by the email client, so it still doesn’t convert them to trackable links that our system can record.
Similarly, opens cannot be tracked in plain text emails, as they don’t support images. Opens can be tracked in HTML emails because they include a piece of code that requests a tiny, invisible image from our web servers. When the image is downloaded, that email is recorded as being opened.
