Plain text or designed emails?

Should your emails look like a letter from a friend or a page from a magazine? Membership site owners often get stuck on this question, especially when setting up a new email tool full of templates. Some insist that plain text always performs better. Others feel a simple note looks unprofessional next to the polished emails members get from big brands.

The honest answer is that each style suits different messages, and most membership sites end up using both. The trick is matching the style to the job the email is doing.

What each style actually means

Plain text email, strictly speaking, contains no formatting at all: no fonts, colors, images or buttons, just words and web addresses. In practice, many people use the term for any email that looks like a personal message, with a white background, ordinary text, no header image and perhaps one or two simple links.

Designed email uses a template with your logo, brand colors, images, buttons and sometimes several columns or sections. It looks more like a web page than a letter.

Between the two sits a lightly branded style that many membership sites use for most messages: a small logo, one column of readable text, a single button and brand colors used sparingly.

When plain text works best

Plain text shines when the relationship is the point. It feels personal because it looks like something a person typed, and people are more likely to reply to it. Use it for:

• Welcome messages from the founder or teacher.
• Emails that ask a question and invite replies, such as “What made you join?”
• Check-ins with quiet members.
• Win-back notes to former members.
• Coaching, advice and story-driven emails where the words carry the value.

A business coaching program, for example, might send nearly everything as plain text, because members join for the coach's thinking and voice, not for visuals.

When a designed email earns its place

Design helps when there is a lot to organize or when the visuals are the content. It is a good fit for:

• Digests and roundups with several items, where headings and consistent sections help people scan.
• Event announcements with dates, times and a clear registration button.
• Visual niches such as a photography community, a quilting club or a home cooking membership, where one image can say more than a paragraph.
• Receipts and account emails, where a consistent branded look reassures members that the message is genuine.

Worked example: one announcement, two styles

Suppose a photography community is announcing a members' landscape challenge. A plain-text version might read:

Subject: A new challenge for you: golden hour

Hi Sam,

The next member challenge is golden hour landscapes. Shoot anything in the hour after sunrise or before sunset, then post your best frame in the challenge thread before the deadline. I'll pick three to critique on the next live call.

Here's the challenge thread: [link]

Looking forward to seeing what you make,

Leo

A designed version would carry the same words but add a striking example photo at the top, a bold “Join the challenge” button and a small panel showing the previous round's winning images. Both are valid. The plain version invites a personal response; the designed one shows off the craft and makes the action unmissable. For a visual community, the designed version is probably the better choice for this email, while the same owner's personal monthly note would stay plain.

Deliverability and accessibility apply to both

Whichever style you choose, a few rules protect your emails:

• Never send an email that is a single image. Many people have images turned off, and spam filters cannot read text inside pictures. The key message should always be in real text.
• Add alt text to images, the short description shown when an image does not load and read aloud by screen readers.
• Use a readable font size and strong contrast between text and background, and check how your emails look in dark mode.
• Write descriptive link and button text, like “Download the worksheet,” rather than “Click here.”
• Keep the code simple. Heavy templates can display badly in some email apps and load slowly.

These points overlap with the wider practices in accessibility basics every site owner should know and email deliverability basics.

Let your members decide with a simple test

If you are unsure which style suits your audience, test it. Send the same email in two styles to two random halves of a segment, keeping the subject line identical so only the style differs. Compare clicks and replies rather than opens, and repeat the test a few times before drawing conclusions, because one test on a small list can easily mislead. Many owners find the answer differs by type of email, which is exactly the point.

Choosing your styles: next steps

1. List the types of email you send regularly.
2. Mark each one as personal, organizational or visual.
3. Use plain or lightly branded text for personal emails, and designed layouts for organizational and visual ones.
4. Build one simple, single-column template you can reuse, with your logo and one button style.
5. Check every template with images turned off and on a phone before you use it.