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Use plain text in your promotional emails to increase your open rates

Send your newsletters and promotional emails in plain text to avoid them getting lost in Gmail's "Promotions" tab.

Louis Vieira of E-commerce Ranker consistently gets over a 40% open rate and high click-throughs on his promotional emails this way. Plain text emails usually aren't flagged by Gmail as promotions, which means the emails end up in the recipient's normal inbox instead of getting lost. Bold and italics don't seem to affect this, so he does use these functions sometimes to enhance readability. These plain text emails also look more like normal business emails, so the likelihood of the recipient paying attention to (and clicking or responding) is higher. According to Vieira, this tactic should not be applied to transactional emails or catalog-type emails.

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  1. 1

    Anyone have experience with this personally? What were your comparable open rates between the two?

    1. 1

      @louisv, do you know what your open rate was before switching to plain text?

      1. 2

        Good question, it mostly hovered around the industry benchmark of 20-25%

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