Old Fashioned Marketing With New Fashioned Technology

It seems we've come full circle when it comes to communicating with our prospects and clients. I noticed recently that I've been paying a lot less attention to online newsletters and those pretty HTML announcements that arrive in my in-box every day. There are a few exceptions of course. But for the most part I'm interested in the CONTENT of what is being delivered, not the design or graphics. When given the choice I no longer ask for the HTML version of anything - instead I choose the text-only version.
There was a time when it was unusual to receive anything but plain text into your email box. Then we moved to designing branded newsletters and "postcard-like" invitations that would capture the attention of our readers. Now, thanks to ever-improving SPAM filters a lot of those fancy invitations, announcements and emails aren't even making it to our desktop. And for those that do get through the fire-wall, we've become jaded and tired of looking at all those designs. We just want the information - short, sweet and simple.
Playing on this hunch we recently experimented with a client that has been holding a series of seminars. As is typical, invitations had been sent out using HTML and branded design. But registrations were down and we were looking for a way to drive attendance. So we sent out another announcement about the event, except this was a simple text email. In the "from" section we had real person's name. In the "subject" line we inserted the name of the seminar. In the body of the email was a sentence inviting the recipient to attend the seminar. We had about 3 key "what you'll get" bullets and the basic description of the 2 hour session.
Within 24 hours of sending out the text email we received an additional 10 registrants for the event. Since the event was capped at 25 attendees, this was almost 50% of our audience! We thought we might be on to something, so we did again for another client event. And again, the results were similar. The plain text email out performed the HTML invitation by over 50%. Why? I think our brains are just a little tired. You can compare this to walking down the Las Vegas strip at night. At first the lights are beautiful and everything captures your attention. But walk the strip every night for months and months and after a while those pretty flashing lights aren't going to capture your attention any longer. You are going to simply focus on arriving at your destination.