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.