The fur is flying in the B2B Online Marketing Group on LinkedIn. It started when Marty Thomas argued that text emails sometimes work better than HTML.

“For small businesses who don’t a strong brand and loyal customer following (or thousand dollar design budget for each email), it is better to use plain text emails,” he explained.

You’d think that this would have gone unnoticed on New Year’s Eve. But it drew an immediate response. And out of six people who commented, nobody totally agreed.

“If I received a personal text email from a company that I am unfamiliar with, I would probably think it’s spam,” wrote Yansu Ouyang.

Elisa Rabate agreed with Yansu, with this qualification: “Text emails always have to be an alternative to HTML emails in case HTML cannot be displayed, but should not automatically replace HTML.”

Paul Borni argued that “you should always use HTML (along with a text version, as mentioned.”) He also noted that “the biggest benefit of using HTML is having access to open-rate data.” But he added that it pays to test, and others agreed.

What do you think?

There are many discussion groups on LinkedIn related to email marketing and direct mail. In Linkedin, click on groups to search.