We Tested Every Email Best Practice (Here's What Actually Works)

The best practices are kind of the worst performing approach. Being aggressive in your welcome series is not a bad thing.

Curiosity is disconnected from true buying intent. So people are opening, they read, they close. There's no real purchase that happens in that cycle.

The job of the subject line is not to get opens, it's to qualify the reader.

So a higher unsubscribe rate, they're typically positively correlated with higher revenue per recipient.

Most brands are over-segmenting, like dramatically over-segmenting. I've seen it all. From the open to the click, they're the masters of the funnel. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. What is up everyone? Welcome back to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything email and retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing and e-commerce. My name is Jimmy Kim, and I'm here with my co-host.

Chase Diamond.

All right, Chase. So you posted something on social last week that blew up, and I want to start this episode there because I think it sets up everything we're going to talk about today.

Was it the one about best practices being wrong, that post?

Yeah, that's the one. You said, and let me grab this quote here. It says, so many things people accept as best practices in email marketing are just wrong. And then you went on to say like a few more examples, aggressive welcome series, subject line strategy, unsubscribes, and so much.

Yeah, the— I remember the comment section was kind of entertaining, right? Half the people were like, finally someone said it. And then half the people were trying to fight me. I don't know why.

Well, in my opinion, that's how you know you hit a nerve.

I guess that's the thing. I think unfortunately most of what gets best you know, best practice kind of quotation is just copied. You know, nobody questions it. Someone wrote it in 2019 and now it's gospel for some reason.

Yeah. And the truth is a lot of that data doesn't back it up. That's the kicker. When you actually look at the numbers across like hundreds of brands, the best practices are often kind of the worst performing approach. So today I thought it'd be fun to do a pod. It's going to be called like the 10 Hot Takes of retention marketing. We'll talk about a bunch of real stuff and stuff that goes against what most people are talking about these days. And I think the good thing is like we will be backing everything that we talk about here today on this pod with some type of data or experience and all that stuff. And the reality is we're probably going to annoy some people and I hope some people leave me some angry comments because I like that.

Yeah, I guess I used to care, but after the last post, I'm over it. So We are going to make this extremely valuable. You know, if you're a retention marketer and you finish this episode without disagreeing with at least one of our takes, we probably didn't do our job.

Yeah. And look, some of these takes I think Chase and I have been talking about for a while, and some are mine, some are going to be— we're going to debate live because I don't think we fully agree on all of them, and that's okay. But if you want to get started, I will kick it off with the first hot take. All right.

Cool.

And then we'll talk about it. So hot take number 1 is that being aggressive in your welcome series is not a bad thing. I think it's actually the most important thing. And this is the one that I think we got the most pushback on your post about.

Yeah, I think because everyone has been told, you know, frankly the opposite, you know, build the relationship first, don't lead with a discount, educate before you sell.

And those things, look, they're not entirely wrong, But they're, I think they're being applied wrong ultimately.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and look, this is what the data says. So in D2C, most subscribers who will ever buy from you do so typically within the first 7 to 10 days after joining your list.

Yeah, not even most, man. I would say the majority.

Yeah, it is true. The majority. And after day 10, conversion rates drop dramatically off a cliff. Sure, you're gonna still get some buyers. We're not saying that, But the bulk of your revenue from a new subscriber is going to happen within that first 7 to 10 day window.

Yeah, and I agree with that. So listen, if you're not being aggressive in that window, you're sending educational content or brand stories or emails for 2 weeks before you make them an offer, in my humble opinion, and I think you agree with me, you're missing the moment that actually matters the most.

Yeah, I definitely agree. You know, the relationship building approach makes sense in, let's call it like B2B email or maybe like a 6-month long sales cycle. However, it does not make sense for someone who just signed up to a beauty brand because they want a discount on a specific product like a serum.

Yep, I agree with you. And you know, I think there's a second benefit that nobody talks about, and it's called list hygiene.

Yeah, that's a great point. You know, the more aggressive the welcome series, the more filtered your list is going to be.

Yeah, look, we talk about this a lot, but in your first 5 to 10 emails, let's say, if they were never going to be your customer and they weren't going to do it, you really don't want them on your list in the long term. They're going to hurt your deliverability.

And your welcome series then isn't just this revenue mechanism, it's also the best filtering mechanism possible. The people that don't engage with these early emails that we're talking about, they aren't going to magically engage later, so just cut them.

Yeah, and look, I also want to add, like, it doesn't mean that you need to be like aggressive, Like rude or pushy aggressive. I mean like leading with the offer, leading with the value, asking for the sale early and often and not burying it in like 2, 3, 4 emails about brand story.

Yeah, exactly. You have to lead with the strongest offer in the first email and then you need to reinforce it across the 4 emails. And by your 5th email, you now have a pretty clear picture of who's a buyer and frankly who's not.

Yeah. And by the way, your polite welcome series, it's not actually being polite. It's just leaving money on the table while pretending to care ultimately.

Ooh, that's spicy, dude.

Yeah.

All right.

All right. Hot take number 2. All right, let's keep going here. Subject lines are not designed to get opens. And I think this one's going to break some brains here. What do you think?

Yeah. At the end of the day, it goes against literally everything every single email marketing course has ever talked about.

Yeah, and honestly, when you said it in your post, I had to think about it for a minute. But then if you think about it, the data kind of backs it up.

Yeah, look, we've analyzed subject lines across a huge portfolio of clients and brands, right? I'm talking hundreds of clients and thousands of campaigns. And we found something extremely interesting. You know, the pattern that increases open rates often decreases click rates and revenue.

Okay, hold on, walk me through this.

Sure. So say for example, like you ask a question in your subject line, That's gonna get you a higher open rate, but it's gonna often lead to lower clicks and lower revenue.

Okay. Explain that for the people, why that is, why that's happening.

Yeah. The reason being is it created curiosity. Sure. It did a good job doing that. And people are going to open to find out the answer to the question that you posed. But often curiosity is disconnected from true buying intent. So people are opening, they read, they close. There's no real purchase that happens in that cycle.

Versus what? Like, what do you compare that to?

Like versus like urgency being like a, a really prime example. So I'm talking about like numbers, promotions, very specific dollar figures. Those are gonna often get lower open rates, but the people who open are more in a buying mindset. They're opening because they saw, you know, what you promised in the subject line and they want what's inside.

Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So like, okay, example. So a subject line like, what's your favorite color? that will get opened a lot because people want to know and trying to answer it, but nothing will actually convert versus something like $40 off ends tonight. May get fewer opens, but the people who actually open buy. Is that right?

Yes, that's exactly right. And we all know at this point, right, that opens are a vanity metric, especially if and when they do not translate to revenue.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, let me add something to this because the job of the subject line isn't to get the open. The job of the subject line is to qualify the reader. Let me say that again. The job of the subject line is not to get opens, it's to qualify the reader, to make sure the people who open are the people who actually might want to buy.

Exactly. That's a really, really great way to think about it and to frame it.

Yeah. Okay. So like if your subject line is so vague and curiosity-driven that anyone might open it, you're not actually doing your job. I think they call this clickbait. You're not just optimizing for vanity here.

Exactly right. And as we know, open rates have been a broken metric since iOS 15 anyway. And the whole Apple Mail privacy protection is going to inflate them artificially. So you're optimizing towards a metric that is fundamentally not even reliable, dude, and you're therefore sacrificing revenue to do it. It doesn't make any sense.

Okay. For the listeners, what do you think marketers should do for this?

Yeah, with this, it's really important that you look at your kind of click-to-revenue ratio. So look at revenue per recipient. And if a campaign had, let's say, like a 28% open rate, but converted at 0.4%, that's worse than a campaign, you know, that has like a 22% open rate that converted at like a 1.4, 1.6, 1.8%, right?

Yeah, always, man. That's spot on. Right.

And everyone talks about this on social media where like views don't pay the bills and impressions don't pay the bills. The same is with email. Like opens alone do not pay the bills. True hardcore revenue and profit. That is what pays the bills.

Yep.

So with that, let's keep going. So I'm gonna tell us hot take 3. That is that unsubscribes are not bad. And in a lot of cases, they actually can be a good thing.

Ooh, we just had a pod on this a couple pods ago, and I think it's a very good take. I know people don't like to hear it, but you wanna explain this to the people?

Sure. So a higher unsubscribe rate, they're typically and often positively correlated with higher revenue.

Okay. Let me play the devil's advocate because I know people are going to question it again, but why?

Yeah, I guess like the— that's a good question to ask, but like at the end of the day, it's because you're sending content that actually has a point of view. It has a vantage point. It's going to potentially rub some people the wrong way and get a lot of people to potentially really be behind it. And here you're segmenting kind of aggressively. So you're sending offers that matter. You're being specific about who you are and, and kind of what you stand for. And therefore people on the other end are going to love it or hate it.

Yeah. And look, the reality is this, and I think we've all learned this, that specific brands attract a specific kind of buyer. That's called the ideal customer bio.

Yes.

Buyer, right? However, they also repel non-buyers, the ones that you don't want, right?

Right, and as we mentioned with the welcome series being more aggressive and then this type of thing, non-buyers, non-openers, them leaving is actually a good thing.

Yeah, whereas if you had low unsubscribe rate, right, or a super low one, what do you think that means?

It means you're playing it safe. You're being way too vanilla. And this is probably the vast majority of brands. They're sending bland, inoffensive content that nobody hates. But at the other side of that too, Nobody's gonna love and get behind.

And if nobody loves it, well, nobody buys it, right?

Bingo. Yeah. And low unsubscribes often are a signal of low engagement and low revenue. People aren't unsubbing because they probably don't even notice that you're there, dude.

All right, let me, let me, let me take something here and I want to take your take and I want to kind of come back at it with a different idea.

Sure. Yeah, go for it.

Hey, quick 60-second break to shout out our title sponsor, Omnisend. If you don't know them, Omnisend is an all-in-one email and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce. They've trusted by over 155,000 merchants with a 4.8 rating star on Shopify's marketplace with over 2,800+ reviews. People love using them. Their support is incredible, responsive team, great help docs, and they actually show up when you need them. 3, look, everyone loves saving a buck. They've got great features and great pricing. Listen, I've heard this inside the community that someone actually dropped their bill by almost 50% and then included their SMS costs, which is absolutely wild. Another agency that we talked to shifted all his clients over when he discovered that he can save them 30 to 60% off of their actual monthly bill. And they're taking that money now reinvesting into ads. And that real money is going to come back into your pocket too, because you're helping them out or whatever it might be. With all this, I literally just helped Chase migrate his personal list to Omnisend not too long ago. It was super easy. They got team, they have an automated solution. It's really great. So if you're looking to scale your email and SMS game, check out omnisend.com/sendit. Tell them Chase and Jimmy sent you. Now back to your pod. All right. Unsubs are good to a point. There's a ceiling. If your unsubscribe rate is over, let's just say like 0.5% on a regular basis, something is wrong. You're either sending to like bad lists or being deceptive in your acquisition, or your quality content has Yeah, I think that's an important nuance here, right?

We're not trying to say you need a 10% unsubscribe rate, but you should probably have a higher unsubscribe rate than you currently do today. It's, I think, the take.

Yeah, and the healthy zone, there's a healthy zone behind it somewhere between 0.15% to 0.4%. Below that, you're probably playing too safe, and above that, you probably have some level of problem.

Yeah, look, I absolutely agree with you. I think unsubscribes are a metric That works kind of as like a U-shaped curve if you think about it like that. Too low is bad, too high is bad, and really the middle, that kind of equilibrium, is where the money lives.

And let me add to this because this is something I started seeing brands do, which is so annoying right now, which is stop trying to save the unsub. Stop them from saying like, are you sure you want to leave? With popups or offers or winbacks or desperation flows. Like, just let them go.

Let them go.

Yeah, let them go. That's what you're doing. And you know, you're doing them a favor by leaving. But you know, all right, hold on. I want to do this next one because it goes against every— well, it goes against what every retention agency sells. You ready for this one?

Yeah, let's hear it.

All right, hot take number 4. Most brands are over-segmenting, like dramatically over-segmenting. I've seen it all.

I personally love this. This is one of my favorite. Can you keep going?

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So dude, I see so many brands and they have like 40— I was just in an account right now before this call, before we did this pod here today, and they had like 47 segments of VIP, repeat 1 time, engage 30, engage 60, engage 90, browse didn't buy, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, post-purchase day 3, post-purchase day 14, and yada, yada, yada.

And let me guess, if you were to ask the retention team, the retention marketer, they're going to all say, well, dude, I'm just doing personalization. Is that correct?

That's right. And the problem is that most brands don't have the volume or the content to actually serve those segments differently the way they want to do it.

Yeah. So what happens when someone does this though, right?

Yeah. So what happens is you have a campaign team, they're either trying to rewrite 47 different versions of an email, which is terrible, Or more likely they write one email and they send it to all these segments. So why did you even build these segments?

Exactly. That's right.

Okay. So look, here's the context behind it. For brands doing, let's say, sub $20 million, which is going to be a majority of the people in the world in DTC, you need to maybe have 5 to 7 segments that may matter. Things like engaged, unengaged, customers, prospects, VIP. I guess about 5, really, that's it.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think some of the comments are going to be like, Jimmy, what? You're telling me to delete segments? Are you serious?

Yeah. I would say you should audit them and look at the ones you've been using and you haven't used it for the last 90 days, or the ones that overlap, the ones that haven't used, delete them. They're just noise. They're freaking scroll after scroll. I was in an Omnisend account just scrolling and scrolling because they had all these segments, but all they were doing is grouping together and sending those same people. It wasn't actually helping them.

Yeah, I hear that. And one kind of quick thing to add here, the segments that you do keep, those are the ones that should have, you know, kind of content variation, not just send or don't send decisions.

Okay, what do you mean by that?

So a lot of brands have like a VIP segment, but they send VIPs the exact same email as everyone else. They just send it earlier. That's not really segmentation. That's just a head start, quick heads up, right?

Yeah, whereas if you're doing true segmentation, it means your VIPs are getting a total different message in entirety. Different angles, different offers, and even a different tone almost.

Yeah, that's right. And if you're not creating the different content for the segment, the segment isn't doing anything for you entirely.

Yeah, and let me add one last piece of advice on my side. Fewer segments, the ones you should have, have real content differentiation. If you can't write different content differentiation for those segments, it just means you have too many segments. So it's quality over quantities.

Right. And as we have these conversations with teams and marketers, I already know the question that other people are gonna think based off the questions we've been getting. Yes, AI does make this easier. You can write segment-specific variations in a matter of minutes now. So the excuse of we don't have bandwidth to write different versions, it doesn't hold true anymore.

Yeah. I mean, dude, there's great AI companies like Allen, for example, that are out there. It's getallen.com, for example. You can create total variations in snap of a finger, so you can use your brainpower for the strategy and use something like Get Allen for variations, for example. Right, Chase. You want to you want to jump us to the next one? Hot take number five.

Hot take number five I got for you: Your abandoned car flow is probably too long.

Ooh, I like that. What do most brands have? Like five, six, seven, eight emails?

Yeah, I'd probably say that's. On average, but I've seen upwards of like 12 email abandoned cart flows. Um, and it's 12 emails about the same cart, dude, like the 1 or 2 items, whatever it might be that someone left behind.

I'm pretty sure that's harassment at that point.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Um, and look, here's the data. Most abandoned cart revenue is going to happen within the first 24 to 48-ish hours. You know, 3 emails in that window does the Bulk majority of almost everything you need.

Yeah, so like email 1 within the first hour or 2, email 2 within that next, you know, 24 hours, and then email 3, let's say 48 to 72 hours, and you're done, right?

Exactly. And I think anything beyond that third email has diminishing returns at best, and active brand damage at worst.

Okay, wait, wait, wait, brand damage? How do you think about that brand damage?

I mean, dude, like by email 5, like the customer has either bought, decided not to buy, or moved on. And I think if you send more emails about the cart that they already abandoned, it just makes you look desperate and it's going to tank your engagement metrics on the backend.

And you know what? I would almost say that it would also even get you marked as spam, which hurts your sender reputation, which hurts not just your abandoned carts, but every email that you're sending.

Yeah, look, so if you're sending, for example, like in the rare kind of extreme case, 12 abandoned cart emails, that's not being aggressive. That's just being dumb. That's like a deliverability time bomb.

Yeah. Okay. But let me add one thing to this. If your abandoned cart isn't a substitute for your actual marketing, I want that to be clear. A lot of brands lean on cart abandonment because they don't see— they don't have a strong campaign program. But cart abandon is like a rescue of revenue. And, you know, there's great tools like Outcraft.ai, for example, that are doing this kind of stuff, and it's gonna be helpful, but that's not a strategy. That's just a great way to recover revenue.

Exactly. So to recap this stuff, 3 emails, strong subject lines, strong call to actions, get in, get out, move on.

Alright. That's good. I like that hot take. Alright. I, I, I, I've got another hot take. I think you're gonna have some strong feelings about this one.

Okay. What is it?

All right, let's go to hot take number 6. Most brands are A/B testing themselves into mediocrity.

Okay, can you defend that?

All right, before we keep going, I want to touch on something every company runs into at some point, creative bottlenecks. You need more variations, more angles, more hooks, and you need them faster than your team can realistically produce them. This is where SuperScale comes in. It's an AI agent built specifically for social marketing. You connect your Meta, your TikTok, and your Google accounts, and it gives your brand context, your ICP, and your past learning, and it pulls its performance data from your campaigns alongside insights from your competitors' ads. From there, you can give it a single prompt, like taking your top-performing creative, and generate multiple new hook variations in different formats and deliver them ready to go. They also have full prompt library and tutorials on their site, which is helpful if you're just getting started. They're trusted by brands like Taxfix and SumUp. You can check them out at superscale.ai. I've got the link below. All right, back to your show. Yeah, here's the thing. Most A/B tests that people are doing on email don't really have any statistical significance. The brands don't have enough volume, the test variants are too similar, and the win is within the margin of error ultimately.

Yeah, well said. I, yeah, I don't have anything to rebuttal there.

Yeah, because most marketers love A/B testing because they think it feels scientific. It feels like a rigor. So they test subject line A versus B to a 10,000-person list and they see a 12% open rate and they're like, that's the winner right there.

Yeah, it's hard to call that a winner, right? It's more just noise.

Yeah, and then they iterate that winner and build on top of that because that's their best practice that they've designed on top of that. And the whole house of cards is built on tests. That didn't actually prove anything.

Nor does actually anyone look at what they're testing and do anything from it anyway. So what's the alternative, eh?

Yeah. So the alternative actually is to test bigger, test things that actually matter. Don't test subject line A, 25% off, or subject line B, save 25%. Test things that are like discount-led promos versus like scarcity-led promos, like strategy-led testing, right? Store-led campaigns versus like a product-led campaign. These are real strategical Testings, right? And then you test send once versus send twice in the same week with the same message, for example, right? These are like actual things that you're doing.

So really what you're saying here is you have to test concepts, not just the same variation of the same thing.

Right? You nailed it. Because concept-level tests are big enough to detect actual differences with the volume most brands have. I'm talking about most brands that have sub-100,000, 200,000 lists here, by the way. Like most brands fall into this thing. And variation-level tests, They don't really tell you anything.

Yeah, look, I definitely agree with you. One kind of slight pushback. I think like there are brands at scale where variation level A/B testing actually does produce real wins. So for example, like, you know, Omnisend or whoever, like, you know, kind of predictive testing tools that can do this for you. I think that's great because they're aggregating across tons of data and millions of sends, right?

Yeah, I can get on that. But again, you have to have huge volume and you're using a built-in tool that aggregates. That's fine. But the average brand, they're just running these manual A/B tests on every send. And honestly, you should stop because you're wasting time and you're not really learning much. It just feels like you're doing stuff.

Yeah, yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense to me. So what's the next point here?

Let's see here. I think we should talk about hot take number 7.

All right, so hot take number 7, sending more often beats sending less. And I'd say that's almost always true.

Marketers hate this one.

Yeah, they really do. I think there's like this idea that like less is more, you know, we don't wanna be annoying, are we? You know, we really respect people's inboxes over here.

And I think it's wrong.

Yeah, look, I think it's almost always wrong. It, it's not 100% of the time wrong, but it's often wrong. And the data says that like brands that go from sending, let's say, 2 times a week to 4 times a week typically see revenue increase in the ballpark of like 60 to 80%. It's not double, but that's a pretty significant boost.

Yep. And there is like minimal impact on unsubscribes too, if you're, as long as your content is decent, of course.

Yeah, that's the big caveat. I think the math just makes sense. Like say for example, if your average campaign drives $5,000 in revenue. Sending twice as often drives roughly twice the revenue. It's not always linear like that, but there are things that tend to show kind of close patterns.

Yeah. And you know what? Most brands don't do this, not because they're, they're not strategic. It's, it's an operational thing. Like producing the amount of content to send more often is really hard.

Right. And we did a really fascinating episode on this about like one person, maybe two person top retention operator teams and And leveraging AI tooling. I think that was in like the last episode or 2. If you haven't checked that out, highly recommend that. But once you remove the production bottleneck, the send frequency stops becoming a content problem.

Yeah, I agree with that. And here's where I'll add the caveat though. Sending more works if your segmentation is decent. If you're blasting your select all full list and you're sending that 5 times a week with random content, Well, let's be honest, you're going to torch your reputation, which is literally what everyone thinks.

Yeah, agreed. 100%.

Yeah. And so the model that works is more sends, but segmented. You're sending 5 times a week, but that sending is going to the right slice of your list, not the same email to everyone 5 times. I want to be really clear when we're talking about this.

Yeah. And then the uneducated subscribers see actually less. They don't see more because they're the ones who get hurt by the oversending.

Oh yeah, that's right. And the formula is send more often, segment more thoughtfully, but at the same time.

Right. So what you're saying, right, is both frequency and relevance working together here.

Yeah. All right, I'm ready for hot take number 8, and I think this is one I think you'll disagree with me.

Okay, let's hear it.

All right, hot take number 8 is Black Friday is overrated for retention marketers.

Okay, that's spicy. I'd love to hear you defend this.

Okay, here's the thing. Brands burn themselves out on Black Friday. They touch their margin, they spam their list, they offer the deepest discounts of the year, and then when January hits, everyone's exhausted, broke, and they've unsubscribed. You agree?

Yeah, that's fair.

And here's the kicker. The customers you acquire on Black Friday are often like the worst LTV customers you get all year. They came from a deal and they'll leave for a deal. They're not loyal, man.

Yeah. Again, so far, all truth, right? Like BFCM customers do underperform LTV, and I think that's fairly well documented, right?

Yeah. And so in my opinion, you're trading short-term revenue for long-term list damage and low-quality customers.

Yeah. Look, I think on the surface it makes sense. I think the part where I have to push back is, you know, BFCM, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is still the highest revenue window of the year for most brands where you just cannot opt out.

Yeah, I'm not telling people to opt out. I'm just stop saying like, stop worshiping it and treating it like it's the holy grail. Stop making it the center of your annual strategy. Stop offering 50% off when 25% off probably would've worked fine. And really the biggest answer is stop sending 14 emails in that week.

Yeah. So what I'm really hearing, right, is like run a strong promo, But don't sacrifice and blow up the entirety of the rest of your year and what's to come when you do it.

That's exactly right. And the brands that win that long-term, like treat Black Friday as it's an important moment, I agree, but just not the entire year. The brands that lose treat it as like their whole identity basically.

Yeah, for sure. So I think where we strongly agree together is I don't think Black Friday is overrated. But the Black Friday that everyone runs in the existing form today is overrated.

Okay. Yeah, I can take that.

Cool. And then, you know, most brands, like, they could trim their BFCM strategy by 40%, and I think they can make actually just as much, if not more money, with less customer fatigue and less team fatigue.

That's exactly what I'm saying. I agree.

Cool. Okay.

Let's go to hot take number 9.

Hey, it's Chase. Got 30 quick seconds? We built something specifically for you. Jimmy and I together have over 20 years of combined experience in email marketing, and we finally put everything together in one place, and it's called Ecom Email Certified. I know it's fancy, but it's going to be great whether you're brand new or running campaigns for 7, 8, 9-figure brands. It covers it all— deliverability, AI, copywriting, design, strategy, SMS, literally everything. Has over 175 total modules totaling 25+ hours of content. Even has quizzes, a community, and you're gonna get a real certification. It's way better than college, right? Don't tell your professor that, but it is. And we've designed it to take you from beginner to certified expert. We're talking about the kind of marketer who actually moves the needle and drives real revenue. Check it out at ecomemailcertified.com. And now back to the pod. So hot take 9, uh, this, this is one that like when I was more active in the agency, like actually selling to clients and, or prospects, um, that like I never agreed with, but they did. So we kind of had to be like, whatever. Um, everyone is so obsessed with email design and has to look beautiful and every pixel has to be perfect and it always has to be designed, right? Like don't do plain text. I think email design actually matters way, way, way less than most brands and retention marketers actually think.

Ooh, this one's gonna upset the email designers.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I'm not trying to offend anyone, I promise, but hear me out. I think the brands with the highest revenue per email that I've seen in the last 2 years are doing a lot of plain text or pretty close to plain text emails.

Yeah, dude. You know, what's funny is if you go into some of these different niches, not e-com, but like different ones, like direct response is a perfect one, or newsletter world, for example. There's no fancy hero images. They don't have any weird complex layouts where things are like left, right, and all that. They just usually have like text, maybe a header image and a button, basically.

Yeah, that's right. I think like affiliate world, direct response world, info world, if you look at those emails, they're Almost entirely plain text, right? And they often have like the best marketers and they're typically years ahead of anything else. Right? Like maybe one product image and a button. That's probably it.

Why do you think that works? Let's, let's explain that.

Yeah, I think a few reasons. I'll share the first one. I'd say plain text inherently just feels more personal. It feels and it looks more like an email from a friend. It doesn't feel at least off the bat, um, like a marketing email.

Yeah. And I'll, and I'll add to that, plain text also has copy and the only thing to do is read the copy, not look at the fancy images. And secondly, I would say that what's really nice about plain text is it just loads fast on mobile.

Right. And then third, with that, not 100% of the time, but often it can bypass some of like the promotion tabs filter in Gmail. Because Gmail often is looking at like heavily designed marketing emails to put in the promo tab.

Yeah. And I'll add one more thing to this, like a 4th piece. I think it's just faster to produce copy, right? So you don't have to ship more often. You can ship more often, which we talked about, but it doesn't take all that work to ship more often.

Yeah. Copy and design are both so subjective, especially when you're working between agency, freelancer, and brand. That beautiful designs are slow, where plain text is just a lot faster. And oftentimes, like, speed, in my opinion, is the king.

Okay. Only pushback here and something that I don't agree on always is that plain text doesn't work for every brand. And I'm talking about, like, luxury brands where the visuals are, like, the core of the product. If your customer is expecting, like, editorial quality, like, plain text reads kind of cheap, basically.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I also think depending on like what email it, it is, right? Like whether it's a customer thank you email, it's a great plain text email. Whereas like maybe if it's like a product drop or a collection drop, you could maybe argue that people actually want to see it. And then like for beauty, fashion, jewelry, I do think visuals matter and you can't go full plain text, at least not the entirety of the time for those types.

Yeah, but I say a hybrid model works well, right? Plain text copy, copy with a good product image and a button. I think you can get the best of both worlds there.

Yeah, I'm with you on that for sure. Right, like stop sending 6 hours designing a hero image and then 30 minutes writing the copy, right? Like flip it. And you don't need to flip it to the same degree. I'd probably cut both, but for illustration points, right? Spend 30 minutes on the design and then the 6 hours on the copy.

Yep, copy is what converts, man. That's what it is. And the design is what makes it look professional, But it's not the same thing. And I think that I agree with you when you kind of give that kind of diagnostic there.

Cool. Yeah, most brands have it backwards is kind of what we're saying.

All right, let's got one more. Let's do number 10, and this might be the most important one of all.

Man, I'm having fun. I don't want this to end, but let's do it. Let's bring it home.

All right, hot take number 10. This one's going to be interesting. Stop copying your competitors. Stop swipe filing your way into more mediocrity.

Man, this is pretty spicy, especially since we own a platform called Inbooks AI, which does give you the intel that people need.

Yeah, I thought about it, but I have a way to defend that. But look, every retention marketer I talk to does the same thing. They subscribe to 50 brands in their category and they look at what those brands are doing and then they just copy it and they call it research.

And what, in your opinion, is wrong about that approach?

Well, look, I'm saying that it makes everyone the same, right? If you copy your competitors and your competitors copy each other, The entire category converges on the same messaging, the same offers, the same design, and even sometimes often the same cadence because you're just copying each other.

Got it. So your issue is the fact that if everyone is the same, then no one is going to stand out.

Yeah. And then you add AI to the mix today and ADI is making mediocre content and it's making content cheaper than ever. So standing out matters more than ever in my opinion.

So what do you believe is like the solution here?

Well, look, I think that it's important to look at your competitors, okay? I think that's really important still. I want people to understand that you should be looking at them to find out what they're doing at a saturated angle and then go do something different against what they're doing and try it.

Interesting. So, you're saying like it's almost the opposite of swipe filing. It's like you're almost reversing the swipe. It's like reverse Uno.

Yeah. Okay. So, let's just say your favorite skincare brand that you have— let me take it back. Let's just pretend you have a skincare brand and you have a competitor and they're doing 20% off promos. Maybe I should try bundling. If you can get that like clean girl aesthetic visuals and you go bold and weird, and then you might send, everyone's sending at 10:00 AM and like a Tuesday night and you're sending it at night, 10:00 AM in the morning and you're sending it at night, for example.

Got it. So you're saying be different and be where your competitors aren't.

Yeah, that's where tools like Inbooks, for example, and tools that actually become more useful. It's not about copying, it's about spotting saturation. That's how I think about it. And you see what that 80% of the brands are doing and you know what to avoid or else you're going to look the same.

Got it. I think that's a good reframe. You kind of had me scared for a while because it's like we have Inbooks AI that tons of people are using. We stand by it. But you're saying use data to identify the crowded lanes. not to just follow Instagrammers. Like, don't go into the most congested traffic freeway. It's like, use your maps to figure out how to avoid them.

Yeah. And find the people who are just sitting around not wanting to be a part of the typical norm and go against the grain or find ways that you stand out ultimately. Because here's the thing, your customer is like on 100 other email lists, like minimum.

Yeah.

If they like something that you sell, let's just again, go to skincare. I guarantee you they're not on just your skincare brand. They're also on another 100 because they like it. And if you sound like everyone else, well, Well, look, you're going to be invisible. But if you sound different, you start becoming memorable and they start talking about you.

Yeah. And the goal is memorable because memorable at the end of the day is what allows the conversions to happen.

All right. So yeah. So I'm not dissing Inbox.ai. I think it's very important, but think about it in a different strategic lens and you can almost see how this could help you in a very different way if you're looking to stand out. All right. Well, with that, that's a wrap for today's pod, man. I'll call this pod something like 10 things most retention marketers get wrong. We'll find a title for it. But if you enjoyed this, make sure if you like, subscribe, comment, all that good stuff. And here's a question for listeners. What was your favorite hot take here? Or do you have one that we didn't say that you had? Or do you think we're wrong? Drop a comment below and let us know. Otherwise, we'll see you next week. From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads Turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.