Jimmy Kim argues plain-text emails beat image-heavy designs in win-back campaigns because spam filters read them better, improving deliverability. Track open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints against benchmarks. If negative metrics spike, pause sending to older segments to stabilize the campaign.
Remember when you're writing your email that you want to use more of a plain text or a minimal HTML, minimal image type email for that initial send so you can not only feel personable, but also maximizing the spam filter. I know there's this whole dilemma in this market about image-only emails versus text. People argue with me left and right, especially the ones that use image-only emails. But the reality is this, it's very proven that text-based is going to help the spam filters read and acknowledge the email a lot quicker than an image-based email. So why put yourself at risk?
And with that, right, like we've talked about data and testing and analytics all the time. Like when you're sending these, you really do want to pay really close attention to the open rate, click rates, the unsub, the bounces, the spam complaints. More than ever, you want to make sure that you really understand your metrics. You want to see how those compare to the industry average. You want to make sure that you're not getting a huge spike in those types of things. So anything does spike, does look unnatural, and there are issues, you probably should consider stopping send to older segments until you can kind of rebuild and stabilize, right? So you kind of press the gas pedal a little bit, kind of see how the car reacts. It's kind of being a little bit wonky. Make sure you fix the engine, make sure the car is running smooth again before you go try to dip your toes back into this strategy. Subscribe to the pod.
