Take a look at these two excerpts from the same sales email:

Sample 1:

Hello [NAME], We here at THISCO wish you and yours a very happy holiday season. As always, we’re here to help make your life easier. Our range of edible gift bouquets has a visual and culinary variety wide enough to suit all tastes. Giving an edible bouquet as a holiday gift to friends and co-workers is an easy and personalized way for you to show them your appreciation. Our edible bouquets can be customized by size, food selection, color and design, and non-edible items included, making each bouquet a genuinely unique gift. Everyone on your gift list will appreciate the quality of the food items in each bouquet, such as exotic, flavorful tea blends, fresh, organic fruits, and hand-crafted, artisan chocolates.

Sample 2:

THISCO Makes Gift Buying Easy

Hello [NAME],

We here at THISCO wish you and yours a very happy holiday season.

As always, we’re here to help make your life easier. Our range of edible gift bouquets has a visual and culinary variety wide enough to suit all tastes. Giving an edible bouquet as a holiday gift to friends and co-workers is an easy and personalized way for you to show them your appreciation.

Our edible bouquets can be customized by size, food selection, color and design, and non-edible items included, making each bouquet a genuinely unique gift.

Everyone on your gift list will appreciate the quality of the food items in each bouquet, such as:

exotic, flavorful tea blends

fresh, organic fruits

hand-crafted, artisan chocolates

How far did you get into Sample #1 before jumping down to Sample #2?

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What’s going on…

The difference between these two excerpts should be clear. Sticking with our theme from Keys to Copy that Delivers Your Message – Not Just Your Email – don’t make your email readers work that hard! How you format your email will either improve or degrade its readability. A readable format improves the chances your emails will actually get read. Let’s take a closer look at some of the formatting differences between these two samples that impact readability:

Lots of white space!

All the text is broken up so the reader’s eyes can skip along where he wants them to go. Using the white space makes it easy to pick out the words that are meaningful to the reader. A block of text, like in Sample #1, doesn’t give the reader any place to focus.

Font and typeface changes highlight key messages.

Guide your readers’ eyes to your most important messages. Using bold and/or italics is tried and true. Don’t underline words unless they’re hyperlinked. Other options are to change the font’s character size or color. But stay away from bright primary colors like red or green. These can trigger a spam filter. You can also change the typeface, but make it one that looks nice with the dominant typeface used. One easy rule to go by is to use one serif typeface and one sans serif typeface (“serif” refers to those little flourishes or tails that appear at the end of a letter). That doesn’t mean any ole combination of serif and sans serif typeface will work, but it’s a good starting place.

Be careful not to overdo it.

Font and typeface changes standout because they’re different from the rest of your text. If you constantly switch-up your font to highlight different words, no one will know where to look. And then nothing stands out. Your email will just look busy, unattractive, and unreadable.

Switch-up alignments.

You see this twice in Sample #2. First, one sentence is centered, and then the bullet list is indented. As with font changes, less is more here. Or the email will come off as disorganized. So pick your spots.

Include images

We’re getting more visual, and images can boost a reader’s interaction with your email. You can find some image sources here, here and here.

One last note about HTML and plain text emails

HTML clearly provides more formatting options, but some people are concerned about spam filters with HTML. Here’s the plain (text) truth: 88% of people prefer HTML emails, so these emails are getting by the spam filters. If your email is going to get flagged as spam, being in an HTML format alone isn’t likely to be the cause . You do want your emails to have a plain text version for those people who prefer that. Your email service provider (ESP) will generally be able to create a text-only option out of your HTML email for you. If you’re committed to sending plain text only, you can still use a number of the formatting tips described above, such as using a white space, alignments, and simple font changes.

Using formatting to pull the reader in

Our eyeballs are under constant assault. No one wants to wade through the Great Wall of Text. So as always → help a reader out! When you format your emails with purpose, you pull your reader in, direct them to your most important messages, and increase the likelihood they’ll act on your content.