Eloqua's Tip Tuesday: Making Sales Emails That Look Like Plain Text

JodyMooney-Oracle

Welcome to “Tip Tuesday”! Each week we post interesting tips and tricks for Eloqua users, on Tuesdays. To see more Tip Tuesday posts, head here.

This week's tip has been shared by @Alexa Kalapaca-Oracle, one of our product managers for the Eloqua team.

Did you know that you can easily make sales email templates that look like they're plain text?

When it comes to creating templates for your Sales org, consider stripping away all those flashy marketing techniques and focus on a simple, plain email. By plain text, we're talking HTML emails that look like plain text. 

Simple, plain text emails: 

• Feel like a one-on one conversation
• Encourage responses
• Improve readability

Here is a sample of what I mean that I received recently that demonstrates this type of plain text email template:

Let’s dig into how to create these emails in Eloqua:

1. Start with your headers and footers

When was the last time you received a 1:1 conversational email that included a link to view online? Probably never. So remove the header from these types of emails. 

Although we didn’t show it, the sample above included an unsubscribe link and we’d recommend keeping that in your footer. Unsubscribe links can help your organization remain compliant with spam laws and not impact your deliverability.

Here is how Alexa set up the Email Group in this case for these Engage emails:

Here’s a knowledge base article detailing how to create a blank header. 

2. Next, look at your signature layouts

Signature layouts allow you to customize the look and feel of email signatures in your templates. For these simple signatures, we’ll want to strip down the signature to only necessary fields and a plain font. 

3. Finally, use the design editor settings to fake that plain text

Using the Design Editor, update the global settings to:

• Set a wide canvas width
• Align the canvas to the left
• Remove the canvas color and background color, 
• And setup a simple readable default font

Here is how the final email template looks in Eloqua:

And how it appears in the Microsoft Outlook Engage plugin:

Thanks for the great tip @Alexa Kalapaca-Oracle!

Have an Eloqua tip you would like to share for a future “Tip Tuesday” post? Drop me (@JodyMooney-Oracle) a message via Topliners with your tip including any relevant screenshots/links to help share your favorite tips with fellow Eloqua users? If your tip is selected, we’ll tag you in the post too!

Malcolm Aldridge

Great TIp @JodyMooney-Oracle and @Alexa Kalapaca-Oracle