Lessons Learned: Why Newton Swears by Plain-Text Emails
An interview with Karthik Suroju of Newton.
Karthik Suroju’s journey as an email marketer at Newton—just about the cleanest, most zen email platform you could imagine, btw—has led him to become a full believer in the power of the plain-text product email.
Karthik holds a pretty firm opinion that email is best thought of as conversation with customers rather than as a one-way communication tool, and that plain-text emails foster this ease and openness of customer connection in ways that HTML emails can’t. As a result of this thinking, Newton ditched their HTML campaigns in late 2015 and replaced them all with plain-text alternatives.
Email is more than just a channel for Newton; it’s kinda their whole bag, so I figured Karthik had put a lot of thought behind this decision. While he’s the first to admit plain-text email probably isn’t right for every company, it’s been a huge revelation for Newton, so we asked him to make his case for this approach.
Side note before we jump in: Newton used to be called CloudMagic until about a year ago, so some of the examples featured below are from that era, but it’s the same company ;)
How did you and your team first decide to switch to plain-text emails?
It was in December 2015. We were approaching our Mac app launch. I prepared the release checklist, and as part of it, we looked at our welcome email after almost a year. I hated it. It was such a dense HTML email!
I went to our UX lead to ‘fix’ it. We were discussing on how to change the theme. The whole theme of the release was to keep things simple and distraction-free, just like our Mac app. During the discussion, I said — “why don’t we have a simple, plain-text email? It goes well with what we are doing”. He nodded. “Also, less work for the design and the development team!” I said, tongue-in-cheek.
From then on, the way we looked at our email campaigns changed. All drip (life cycle) emailers are now plain-text. Our users loved it. The response rate to our emails went up by 156%. Even for our newsletters, we try to keep things simple with just one image.
Old (Early 2015):
Current:
Can you talk about the “all emails being conversations” ethos a bit?
At Newton, we are user-centric and are known for providing exceptional customer support. For us, every user matters. Everyone at Newton, including our CEO, responds to the customer tickets. We want to talk to our users, hear what they have to say.
Email is the best source of communication for us, and hence we strive to make every email we send conversational. Here are a few things that we follow:
- We never send ‘No reply’ emails, even when we’ve to share the news with millions of our subscribers.
- We encourage users to reply to all our emails, newsletters included.
- We respond to all queries within a few minutes, even on holidays.
Here’s an example of an email we’ve sent to gather user feedback:
What have you found to be most valuable about your switch to plain-text email?
Better relations with the users. With a plain-text email, they know that they are talking to a human on the other end. It encourages them to reply more, share their thoughts/feedback freely. What’s more valuable to a young, growing company than their users’ feedback?
We discussed some types of businesses/email strategies that plain-text might not be preferable for (bank statements, sales promos, digests, etc). What’s an example of a time where you felt this tension for Newton (i.e. wanting to send an email campaign that could have really used HTML?)
There are a couple of instances: we ran a Thanksgiving offer, and another when we needed to share a lot of features as part of our new update. Even in such cases, where visual elements make your communication better, we try to keep things very simple. We either use a single, simple header image or convey the feature using of a GIF. We always stick to the simple/minimal nature of our brand.
If you could make your case for plain-text communication with customers using only one email from Newton’s last year, what would it be?
Our welcome email makes a strong case for plain-text emailers. But, let me better it.
There was a rare instance when one of our iOS updates started crashing for few users. We pushed an immediate fix, but still felt it was our responsibility to reach out to the users and offer an apology. And we did with this simple plain-text email:
We expected our users to abuse us, leave one-star reviews in the stores, and maybe leave us for our competitors. But, what followed is a different thing altogether: most of them only had kind words to say. Yes, the love for the product and the team behind it is the one reason they stuck with us. I’d also like to give credit to the no-nonsense, plain email we’ve sent them.
Plain-text puts us right where we want to be: learning from our customers directly about how our product can serve them better.
Curious if plain-text email is right for your campaigns? At RGE, our stance is to test the hell out of whatever you’re sending, and to pay attention to what your audience responds to in order to make decisions. For starters, we recommend GoodEmailCopy.com to get some ideas of how to tweak simple email copy for maximum whoa!-factor.
Karthik Suroju is a digital marketer at Newton. An avid reader, he wishes Harper Lee would have written more. Always open for a discussion on sports, startups and Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Say hello to him on Twitter -@karthiksuroju
