Am I reading any of this data incorrectly? Is this a case where the answer really is, "it depends"? Or is there truly one format that is better than the other?
Right now my position is that for the effort, you're better off writing good content than worrying about your template.
We've seen really strong performance from simple formatting (bold, italics) where the focus is on building a relationship with the user:
"Hi, I just saw you signed up and wanted to help you get started". This is meant to feel hand-written.
I saw that thread and rather than make unsubstantiated claims in response, I want to get a better understanding of when you should use a highly-styled layout and gather some data.
Multi-column in my opinion is way out. It's a mess on mobile, and you probably shouldn't do it. A great example of a nice single-column, styled email is campaign monitor's newsletter.
Plain text: $17,500, Fancy: $4,300.
A bunch of replies in this thread have people saying HTML emails perform better than plain text ones:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4856529
Am I reading any of this data incorrectly? Is this a case where the answer really is, "it depends"? Or is there truly one format that is better than the other?