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Benjamin_Lillie
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February 7, 2011
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Option to Text Only Emails

  • February 7, 2011
  • 55 replies
  • 14889 views
We would like to have the option to send text-only emails as a blast, due to issues with deliverability with HTML, as well as to make an email look more authentically like a sales email. I'm aware that this would effect our ability to see opens in reporting, but it would still be good to have this option.

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    Anonymous
    May 26, 2011
    Marketo: Why is this a "Maybe someday"? 
     
    Seriously, this can't be difficult. 
     
    A) You already have the text version. 
    B) It's just a true/false check. 
    C) And you only need it in a few places - perhaps as few as one place - the flow action.
     
    I know it's not glamorous, in fact it's a step back in time. It's something that should have been there from the beginning. But it's really, really, really important for email deliverability. This is much more important than stuff "we like" like field sorting, object renaming, etc. That stuff is more complex and has absolutely nothing to do with lead conversion and revenue.
     
    Why is this not on the product roadmap for immediate release? Why is this not important enough to merit your attention?
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    Anonymous
    May 25, 2011
    I NEED TEXT ONLY EMAIL. HTML IS NOT A SUBSTITUE
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    Anonymous
    May 9, 2011
    NA
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    Anonymous
    May 9, 2011
     God yes. We need to do this because lots of government agencies and universities won't even accept HTML emails, period. 
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    Anonymous
    February 17, 2011
     Yeah, even if there is an included text version the client ignores it. But if there is not HTML version and just a text version then the client would read/display just the text version. And really our goal, interestingly enough, is to move away from HTML and more to text. We think that our targets now view pretty HTML emails as automated and not real and they are less likely to view them. So it'd be nice to have a text-only send feature.

    As for the tracking image... yeah, everyone wants to know opens but you are right, it's a sketchy science and I could do without it all together. Just having that numbers creates expectations when what we really care about is clicks and conversions, not just eyeballs on words.

    As for shorter urls... always.
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    Anonymous
    February 17, 2011
    Your system is doing what many systems do, it strips out the content from the HTML version and ignores the text version completely.  Theose two links at the bottom are the 1x1 transparent gif that tracks "opened" in normal circumstances and the other is the unsubscribe.  The unsubscribe is definetely useful.

    I personally would love to see an option to not include the tracking image.  I find "OPEN" to be a really sketchy metric.  Open doesn't mean read and read doesn't mean the image was loaded.  Most HTML email clients block images anyway.  I think this would achieve your goal of the email looking as clean as possible.

    Additionally, I'd like to see a "short URL" instead of that long crazy one to do the links.  This would also make it much easier to look at.  Maybe a separate idea of "short URLs in Emails" would be more to the point.
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    Anonymous
    February 17, 2011
    Here is a stripped down email from Marketo to me. It has no images and it looks like text, but it's clearly got other stuff in there - all from Marketo. Does it look like a text email? Well, as close as we get I suppose.

    http://www.eeye.com/eEyeDigitalSecurity/media/misc/not-horrible.jpg


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    Anonymous
    February 17, 2011

    Those are actually sent out by Salesforce's system.  The community is based on the Salesforce Community Portal.  Marketo sends out emails from an entirely different system.  The thing I need is for you to send out an email from Marketo using the blank template and show a screenshot of that.  You can embed screenshots here using the little icon in the editor bar in the middle next to the link icon.

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    Anonymous
    February 17, 2011
    Glen, here's how your email, sent via the Community softare, looked in my Outlook:

    Default view:
    http://www.eeye.com/eEyeDigitalSecurity/media/misc/view1.jpg

    After clicking the gray bar to convert to HTML:
    http://www.eeye.com/eEyeDigitalSecurity/media/misc/view2.jpg

    And then after clicking to display images:
    http://www.eeye.com/eEyeDigitalSecurity/media/misc/view3.jpg

    All of that for a tiny litte Marketo logo. And even if you take out the logo, you sill have conversion messages that in some respects look like an error message. Simple text send would be great.

    Now, does the HTML email with not layout or images suffice? Sure, it'll do. 
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    Anonymous
    February 17, 2011
    Wondering if you can post the screenshot here. It's nice to see how emails look for others - I can only see how they look on my own screen and cross my fingers that it looks similar for my recipients.
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