Not sure your emails should have plain text, be formatted pretty, include pictures, etc? Take a quick listen.
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Transcript
What’s up, Liz Wilcox here, the fresh princess of email marketing. We are on episode 68 and you are making me feel amazing because you’re listening. So let’s talk about email and images. The age old question, right? Should I have plain text? Should my email be formatted all pretty like when do I include pictures?
How many is too many? All that stuff. So number one, when it comes to plain text verse, uh, you know, like formatting and stuff like that, like what is your brand? My brand is is, and I’ll say it, it’s stupid simple. I like to keep things stupid simple. Um, the easier and less friction, the better. And so my emails are just plain text.
Every once in a while, I’ll throw in an image or a GIF, um, But I’d like to just get in there, get to the point, and get out when it comes to sending emails. So, I save images for, uh, number one, sales emails, right? People love images. I save GIFs for sales emails. They really, because yes, uh, Images and GIFs and things like that can help boost click rates, your open rates for future emails and, you know, give overall engagement.
So I kind of reserve them for when I really, really need boosted engagement. Right. Cause during a launch, you know, engagement’s going to go down, down anyway. So how can I boost it? How can I maximize that’s when I put in images, things like that. Also in the pre launch to keep people’s attention. But in just a regular old newsletter, plain text for me.
Now, if you have a brand, like say you’re a web designer or, uh, you know, I don’t know, some kind of fancy brand or you’re a local realtor or something, you might have a formatted email. You know, your HTML is a little more coded. You’ve got a banner up top, a banner on the bottom. That’s totally fine. I actually find or have found in this year.
I probably do need to have an image banner at the top with my face and name on it because there’s a million and one Liz’s out there. I think it’s been in like the top 20 names every single year, you know, since 1127, right? Like, it’s just a very popular name. So I should probably add that. Maybe I’ll do that in 2025.
Somebody email me and remind me that I want to do that. Uh, so Patricia knows, and I’m not just talking. Anyway, so if you have a very, like, aesthetically pleasing or you’re known for your beauty online, yeah, sure, have some images or have a little formatting in your emails, but there is such thing as too much of a good thing, right?
Too many images can and will likely trigger the spam filter, right? If the server itself can’t read the content of the images, right, if the internet gods can’t read the image, it can likely decide to just put you in spam or block you completely just as a precaution. So it does affect deliverability, but listen, you’re likely not doing too much that it’s going to affect your deliverability, right?
You’re definitely not sending image only emails, right? Where you create the email on Canva and download it, and that’s what you put into your email. Email service provider, right? You’re not doing that. So you’re also likely not sending millions of emails a month or a year, or, you know, putting hundreds of images a month into your emails, right?
So just email on a regular basis. Put images where you find them appropriate or fun, necessary, clever. And you shouldn’t have to really worry about this at all. Now, I, this is my own personal rule and I’m not a deliverability expert. I’m not. But I don’t like to put more than two images in one email. It just feels like too much.
And normally my emails are pretty short, you know, between four and six hundred words, if, if that’s, um, I really try to get under four every time, um, and so, you know, putting more than that would be wouldn’t make any sense, right? So again, use the images sparingly, um, so that they’re pattern interrupters, right?
Like, oh, Liz sent an image today. Wow. She, she doesn’t do that often. I’m going to look and oh, that image catches my eye because people are visual learners and visual processors. Oh, that image catches my eye. Maybe I wouldn’t have read this entire paragraph before the image, but now that the image has caught my eye, I, I find that I’m reading it right now.
Of course, if you put an image in every email, they’re going to skim by it. They’re not going to process it. Right. And then of course, you know, use JPEG, PNG, GIF files are okay. You can embed, copy paste, uh, you know, um, what’s the word I’m looking for? minimize the size, like compress the file, uh, you know, but again, you don’t have to do, if you’re doing images often follow those best practices.
But if you don’t know what the heck I’m saying and you just want to put an image in and you’re like, how do I compress a file? And I didn’t know that was a thing. Look, I don’t do it. But I, again, I use them sparingly, but I’m emailing on a consistent basis. So my reputation with the internet gods is good enough that, Oh, Liz is putting an email or an image in her email.
Oh, but she has such a good reputation. You know, we’re going to let it pass anyway. All right. So hopefully that helps, uh, end the debate on images. Hopefully it helps you land on what is right for you and your business. If you would like, aside from images, if you would like. Help with your email marketing and what to put, you know, the words to put in your emails alongside those images.
I’d love to invite you to email marketing membership as 9 a month. I’m going to send you an email template every single week that you can take and make your own. And yes, add images too, if that’s what you would like to do. Uh, the link is in the show notes as always, I am Liz Wilcox. You are awesome. And I’ll see you on the next episode, my friend.