AI-generated images in marketing emails are backfiring. People instantly spot the fake models, the weird fingers and plasticky skin trigger distrust, and in beauty and fashion that kills your credibility. Customers assume if you cut corners on images, you're cutting corners everywhere.
AI-generated imagery in email is quietly tanking customer trust. I'd love to hop onto this one. I've got a couple of things. First and foremost, customers can spot AI-generated images almost immediately. And maybe it's not like a conscious thing, right? But the gut reaction is there that says something's kind of fishy here. That gut reaction that tends to help drive conversions more than logic itself. So if they are sensing this, then that's a big issue that can block conversions because AI faces, at least historically, are really bad offenders here, right? The eyes are typically off. Sometimes hands have weird fingers. Obviously it's getting a little bit better, but it's still a little bit weird. Skin texture looks a little bit kind of plasticky, for lack of a better word. And if you think about like beauty, fashion, wellness, etc., like really true categories that depend on like this aspirational type of imagery, if you use fake people in your emails, I think that really diminishes and damages your actual authority and your positioning. So I think the customer therefore then thinks like, if they're using fake models, what else are they going to be faking, right? And you might not be faking anything at all, but even that slight doubt in the customer's mind, really disruptive for a brand in a bad way. And that trust isn't just about the image, it's about really what the image signals about the brand's care for their customers and their subscribers.
