Suplexed straight to spam

I’ve seen a lot of good people and good brands falling for a trap as old as email marketing is: 

The use of images, unnecessary formatting, and the desire to design “pretty” emails.  

I know, I know. 

It seems like every corporate brand does this because they do. (What you don’t see is the large mob payments they make to the likes of Gmail for inbox placement.) 

It seems like having emails that are “on brand” make you seem more buttoned up and professional. (What you don’t see is that if’n you’re selling to humans, humans buy from people, not from brands.) 

And I get the temptation to be wary of the plain-text email because it seems like the exact opposite of most of the emails that land in your inbox, unless they’re from co-workers, friends, or family. (What you don’t see is that is the exact point: It makes you seem like a human, not a brand. This radically improves your email deliverability, your influence, your impact, and yes, your sales. But not just only your sales… but your sales from your best customers instead of the ones who are instantly gratified so badly that they buy because of a pretty email template instead of because they need what you offer, and then cause a never-ending amount of headaches and frustrations because the instantly gratified are rarely any business’s ideal customer.) 

But worst of all? 

Yesterday, I saw a popular TikToker that I wrote an email for (which did gangbusters, but alas, it wasn’t a good fit because his brand was still too young and small) send one of these heavily-templated, image-laden emails. 

Guess where it landed: 

My spam folder. 

I unmarked it as spam because I genuinely like the guy and the brand. 

But I doubt the thousands of people on his list did the same… 

Now, he made a ton of mistakes that landed him in spam: 

* Didn’t mail consistently (which is the single most important thing you can do for your deliverability) 

* Added 20 different images to his email (and it looks like he tried to add even more, but the message clipped and you can’t even see the entire email—another problem that people who like to add images to their emails almost never consider… and it suplexes their email straight to spam) 

* Besides the images themselves, he also included a lot of unnecessary formatting: A grey background “around” the email, a black background halfway down into the email, menu items as if an email is nothing more than a website, 20+ buttons where half were white and the other half were orange, etc. 

* Even the “from email address” wasn’t optimized—it had a series of letters and numbers after the @ symbol… and was also sent from the “communications” moniker instead of a human name 

* I clicked the “view entire message” at the bottom of this email because it was clipped, and I was correct: He didn’t include 20 images, he included 39 images!

Each and every one of these things suffocates deliverability. 

More:

There was nothing even semi-persuasive in this email. It was just pictures of products, the name of products, the price of products, and a button to buy said products. 

But worst of all?

When I sent an email for him a few months back, I sent it from the perspective of his dog. His dog has just as big of a presence on TikTok as he does, and so, it offered his fans another way to bond more with the brand. It gave them the opportunity to buy something, yes. But it was really a way to make “humanize” or perhaps “doganize” the brand. 

But instead, he tried it himself, made a ton of deliverability-crushing and persuasion-sinking mistakes… 

…and landed in spam and probably got a big, fat zero in terms of sales. 

Moral of the story? 

The only thing worse than adding one image to your email is adding several images. 

At least in terms of deliverability, but this also rings true for sales and revenue too. 

(This isn’t to say you can never add images… but if you’re just adding images because it looks like successful corporations add images to their emails, then, well, you’re playing the game not to lose instead of playing to win.) 

I’ve tested this a thousand times: Writing persuasive emails without relying on the “crutch” that images pretend to have (they rarely, if ever, have the benefits most people who add images to their emails think that they do) results in higher opens, higher clicks, higher revenue, and a stronger bond with your email list. 

This only becomes more true with each passing day: The latest Apple iOS update doesn’t even open images automatically when you land in a primary inbox. 

In other words: Adding images creates more friction in every possible way: 

* It costs your list’s ESP (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) more in server fees 

* It costs your email marketing platform more in server fees

* It costs you more time and energy in creating and sending an email 

* It’s much more likely to land in spam, where most people will never see it 

* And, even if it doesn’t land in spam, if your list is opening it on an updated Apple phone, they have to click a separate link to even be shown the images

I could go on and on and on. 

Just think twice before you add a logo header, a signature, or 39 different images to an email. 

It’s not how you persuade people to know, like, and trust you. In fact, it does the exact opposite. 

Need help writing emails that don’t rely on images? 

Hit reply and let’s chat. 

John