Option to Text Only Emails

[Benjamin_Lillie]

We would like to have the option to send text-only emails as a blast, due to issues with deliverability with HTML, as well as to make an email look more authentically like a sales email. I'm aware that this would effect our ability to see opens in reporting, but it would still be good to have this option.

[Anonymous]

Have you still found deliverability issues with Blank Template html emails? We've sent a few of those to look more "sales authentic" but I have not specifically tested deliverability rates so I can't comment. They look authentic though!

[Benjamin_Lillie]

Hi Michele, we haven't specifically tested deliverability rates with blank HTML emails, but it would be great to have the ability to test both. I've heard success stories of other marketers, specifically in the software industry, having success with sending text only emails.

[Anonymous]

I send out nearly ALL of my "Sales Follow Up" emails through Marketo based on triggers from status changes.  All of them are blank template emails that appear to be sent from the Sales rep, using merge tokens.  My deliverability rates areconsistently  higher than any marketing template email I send.

That doesn't necessarily mean I would change all emails to Blank templates so it appears to just be in text form, but depending on the type of communication you are sending I do agree that the "text" format is a good option.

[Anonymous]

In addition to deliverablity, you have aesthetics/readability.

Some corporate email rules convert HTML emails to text and tell the user that right there in the email with big error-like messages. Such is the case in our corporate email. Every single HTML email that comes to us looks ... well, like a broken HTML email that is pretty much not worth viewing. Even if we go with a blank HTML email the email is still sent as HTML and our rules still trash the email when it comes in.

Seeing as how the otpion to send/recieve emails as text is pretty well standard email fare, I would argue that this is a Marketo design flaw and not a feature request.

[Anonymous]

Kyle,  I'd love to be able to reproduce this.  What is your email system?  Can you send me a screenshot showing what you mean?  Specifically the blank email template and how that looks.

Thanks,  Glen
glen@marketo.com

[Anonymous]

Wondering if you can post the screenshot here. It's nice to see how emails look for others - I can only see how they look on my own screen and cross my fingers that it looks similar for my recipients.

[Anonymous]

Glen, here's how your email, sent via the Community softare, looked in my Outlook:

Default view:
http://www.eeye.com/eEyeDigitalSecurity/media/misc/view1.jpg

After clicking the gray bar to convert to HTML:
http://www.eeye.com/eEyeDigitalSecurity/media/misc/view2.jpg

And then after clicking to display images:
http://www.eeye.com/eEyeDigitalSecurity/media/misc/view3.jpg

All of that for a tiny litte Marketo logo. And even if you take out the logo, you sill have conversion messages that in some respects look like an error message. Simple text send would be great.

Now, does the HTML email with not layout or images suffice? Sure, it'll do. 

[Anonymous]

Those are actually sent out by Salesforce's system.  The community is based on the Salesforce Community Portal.  Marketo sends out emails from an entirely different system.  The thing I need is for you to send out an email from Marketo using the blank template and show a screenshot of that.  You can embed screenshots here using the little icon in the editor bar in the middle next to the link icon.

[Anonymous]

Here is a stripped down email from Marketo to me. It has no images and it looks like text, but it's clearly got other stuff in there - all from Marketo. Does it look like a text email? Well, as close as we get I suppose.

http://www.eeye.com/eEyeDigitalSecurity/media/misc/not-horrible.jpg

[Anonymous]

Your system is doing what many systems do, it strips out the content from the HTML version and ignores the text version completely.  Theose two links at the bottom are the 1x1 transparent gif that tracks "opened" in normal circumstances and the other is the unsubscribe.  The unsubscribe is definetely useful.

I personally would love to see an option to not include the tracking image.  I find "OPEN" to be a really sketchy metric.  Open doesn't mean read and read doesn't mean the image was loaded.  Most HTML email clients block images anyway.  I think this would achieve your goal of the email looking as clean as possible.

Additionally, I'd like to see a "short URL" instead of that long crazy one to do the links.  This would also make it much easier to look at.  Maybe a separate idea of "short URLs in Emails" would be more to the point.