When email marketing moved from boring plain text to glorious HTML, everyone quickly discovered that an eye-pleasing presentation leads to better results. But that does not mean you can eliminate the plain text version of your email altogether.

First, some users actually prefer text to HTML, and your job as a marketer is to give them what they want.

A less obvious reason is that we now live in a world of PDAs, cellphones and other mobile devices. Mobile clients often display the text version by default, even if the user prefers HTML at the computer.

Plain text newsletter that delivers the articles up front

Retail email that puts the pitch in the upper-left corner