Creating “plain text” for your eblasts

Question

I’m setting up my eblast to go out, and I see there is an area for a “plain text” version. What does this mean and how do I create it?

Answer

The “plain text” version is just that: plain text. No links. No bold, italic, etc. A drag, right?

Plain text is your fall-back for email recipients that are not receiving HTML (pretty) emails. Having a plain text version ensures they see something when they get your email – even if it isn’t pretty. Customers who receive the HTML version will never even see it.

Tips:

• You can spell out the links, but you can’t make things linkable. Pretend you are doing it on a typewriter. You may need to generate some extra copy to make up for the images that aren’t available
• You can add dashes or other symbols to separate items.
• To mimic italicize words, you can put slashes on either side of italic text = /word/
• To mimic bold you can put asterisks on either side = *word*
• To mimic underline plain text you use an underscore – _word_

These are just acceptable ways to indicate something is bold, italic, etc. You are not actually doing it.