The Joys of Plaintext

The Joys of Plaintext

I don’t do HTML mail. It gets in the way of communication.

I recently brought this up with a client and their response was they found it ”refreshing.” That was good to hear, as on this end facing only 12 point Courier as you compose strips away the pretense and forces the sender to really concentrate on the words being used.

I have been a plaintext email advocate for years, so Adam Sherk’s post reciting best practices for Email Press Releases Do’s and Don’ts circa 1999 reminded me of some of the reasons I have remained an “undecorated” correspondent. In some respects Twitter was a welcome technological advance: where the web page/browser construct has a literally unlimited word count, a tweet, again, forces one to be concise. And in this content-laden world that is a very good thing.

Of course now press releases are tweeted, blogged and “liked,” not just emailed. In addition to Sherk’s excellent suggestions, which still hold true today (keep your email press releases short, properly formatted and relevant) I have a few other tips I would like to throw into the mix.

• Avoid the word “announces”

  Especially in the headline, this is an invitation to yawn. Dig deeper, and figure out why the announcement is important to the reader, your customer or a prospect.

• Avoid jargon

  Not everyone is in your industry, and press releases can go overboard with buzzwords. Tell the story simply and explain when necessary.

• Describe your offering precisely

  I am not sure when it happened, but if what you are offering is a ”solution” then you are in the legion of tech companies who don’t know what they are offering. If it’s software, call it software, if it’s a service call it a service and if it’s a platform call it a platform. I am quite sure more than 1,000 press releases were issued today describing a company’s “solution” or the equally tired “solution set.”