Engagement of HTML vs Plain Text emails

[Anonymous]

My audience is IT executives, and we are starting to ramp up with Marketo. I am planning to test designed HTML templates vs plain text emails. For those of you who work in B2B, what is your experience like between these formats? Do you see more click-throughs with plain text or fancier HTML? 

[Anonymous]

HTML always. It'd be interesting to know if IT executives block images or HTML more than another industry. For physicians, we always have better results with HTML, since the content appears more engaging.

[Anonymous]

Hi David -

We are fairly new ot Marketo as well, and are an IT B2B.  I see that HTML emails are still the go-to.  Even for mobile devices, the text only is an extremly low percentage.  One suggestion is - stick with mobile friendly layouts and HTML will most likely be a focus for you. I only say this because we don't have exact numbers but assume that an IT person is more likely to look at mobile while in the field, etc.  Plus the text e-mails automatically render from you HTML, so you should be covered.

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I know this is an older post but still relevant if you're still out there. We've been testing the same thing and seem to get better results with text emails, however it depends on certain variables such as how engaged/receptive the audience is, or what stage of the lifecycle they're in. I also came across this article this morning: Plain Text vs. HTML Emails: Which Is Better? [New Data]

I plan to do some further testing on plain vs. html in the coming week for a cross-sell campaign. Let me know if you've come across any other data or had specific experiences of plain vs. html since this was originally posted--would love to hear others' experiences. Thanks!