A couple months ago I was grilled by Brian Kurtz in his Titans Xcelerator group, along with my biz partner at BerserkerMail Troy Broussard, about…
Pictures/graphics/images in emails.
Brian was keen to hear why we ban them from our BerserkerMail platform.
And there are many reasons besides just potential inbox deliverability problems.
For example:
It helps keep pricing down since it’s less load on the servers. It also means not having to waste resources policing the platform for explicit images, complicit viruses, or illicit tracking code evil people like to embed inside graphics. Plus, there no having to waste development resources – us and our clients – trying to keep up with all the various ISP-specific, device-specific, or email reader-specific spam filter rules with images (like text-to-image ratios, etc).
Then there’s writing-side of things.
Specifically, creating Vision that leads to buying from your business.
Images in emails are presumably designed to create vision.
But all they mostly create is scrolling (the weakest form of engagement you can get when selling something) and/or creating objections depending on the image. In my own business it has always been far more profitable to let the reader’s imagination create that vision – based on their needs and wants, not mine – that inspires them to want to buy, and not me trying to shoehorn it unto them.
That is how I use “images” in emails.
And with no worrying about spam filters, rules, image sizing, etc necessary.
This is literally copywriting 101 we’re talking about here.
Following was shared on Twitter by a fellow named Ed Reay.
I don’t know how old the ad is he pulled it from.
But it’s a perfect example of what I am referring to:
“Did you ever notice that when you’re fat, men don’t look you in the eye? They look across your shoulder. There’s no eye contact. My name is Leslie McClennahan I’m a real person. I live near Goose Creek, South Carolina. Up until two years ago, I was never looked in the eye. By anyone.”
Helluva start to an ad.
And the above words conjure a different image, depending on who is reading it, totally “custom designed” just to that specific person’s needs/wants/desires/situation/insecurities/pains/frustrations/life experiences. And because it’s their own imagination, that image is going to be a whole lot more engaging, emotional, dramatic, relevant, and horrifying than anything some wannabe edgelord can fap out of Midjourney.
It can often go beyond just email media, too.
Like, for example, one of my customers told me:
“I won the small prize of being best speaker at Toastmasters the other night. The headline was ‘How many billions did Figure 2 cost?’. (I’ll spare you the details). Because I listen to elBenbo, I didn’t put any images in my speech. Instead I used the power of my words to describe Figure 2! Much cleaner, less clunky, more engagement – would never had done that before! (Literally the whole speech was on a diagram and they never saw it lol).”
You can obviously do whatever you want and works for your business.
But in my opinion and experience, if you know know what you’re doing you won’t need ‘em. And I daresay you’ll also do a far better job of using images with words than you will with slick graphics and pretty pictures and edgelord AI-generated memes.
Which reminds me of another point made on the call with Brian’s people:
The importance of controlling the end-to-end user experience.
All the great merchandisers focused first and foremost on the end-to-end user experience. Walt Disney and Steve Jobs were especially obsessed with that. They did not want to leave that experience to chance. And no matter what your favorite goo-roo prancing around the seminar stage says, emails all look different, show different, and simply are different across various devices — phone (Android vs iPhone), iPad, desktops, laptops, including on how new or old said devices are and how up-to-date the software is.
For example:
I see marketers using HTML tables in their emails, instead of letting text wrap naturally.
Why?
I don’t know.
Probably some goo-roo told them they tested it and it gets “more response!”
And while having a pretty HTML table in your emails is not bad in and of itself, there are many times when people read them on a smart phone and have to use their fingers to scroll to the end of each line to read it, and then finger scroll back to the beginning of the next line, to read that one. They can be unreadable even though they are often professionally designed.
You can never 100% get rid of this sort of thing, admittedly.
Sometimes boomers will complain to me about how they can’t read my emails across their 40-inch computer monitor — instead of just using their mouse to shrink the email reader window, where everything will naturally wrap nicely, at whatever is most comfortable for their eyes.
What can I say?
Nobody is perfect…
Point is, the more you can control the end-to-end user experience the better. Not to mention how inane emails with pictures can look to the rising number of people who turn off images altogether. They aren’t looking at anything but a blank square or, worse, multiple blank squares. Or, even worse than that: ALL blank squares.
I doubt anyone reading this would have image-only emails.
But a large number of ecommerce businesses do and it looks stupid.
I can already hear the goo-roo fanboys rapidly typing a reply:
“But I tEsTEd it!11”
Very few people are willing to engage in the long-suffering rigorous discipline and number of actions to a big enough number of leads a legitimate test entails. Yes, this includes me. I am a “write it and send it” and move on with my day and life kinda guy, and so I am probably the last person anyone should listen to about this. So instead, I listen to those who are able to do it, and who do the work, and who understand testing emails beyond shallow A/B split tests.
Take, for example, my business partner at BerserkerMail Troy Broussard:
* Was a nuclear submarine engineer for the Navy (where he had to do “for real” science, not the fake Fauci-like internet marking goo-roo science, or something could potentially blow up 3 miles out to sea).
* Was also the Executive Director of Technology for Encyclopædia Brittanica (running a $12 million department of developers and so knows how platform creators think).
* He also owned a multi-million SEO company (where he had to know what Google actually wants vs what some goo-roo guesses it wants).
* After that he was a world renown email automation specialist who routinely did the testing/tracking/automating for as many as 50 million emails per month (seeing all kinds of data, patterns, and buying behavior 99.9% of us will never see).
* He also wrote what at the time was considered the “bible” for a lot of Infusionsoft users using automation, which the great Perry Marshall even wrote the introduction to, if that tells you something.
And I can tell you this:
Listening to how a guy like Troy – an actual scientist, trained in using the scientific method, who practices what he preaches with it – approaches and conducts testing with email vs what these chuckleheads haunting social media all day say and do about the subject is a night & day difference.
All right that’s all I got to say about this today.
If you want more info on the paid Email Players issue go here:
Ben Settle
