Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

We did the same thing however we branded with a background color and logo instead of a newsletter. [0] Great results.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/lTrYJ

Ive sent many campaigns and theyve mostly been received with open arms (including cold oned). The difference (IMO) is how much value you send on each email. If it's a standard pitch then forget about it. A good email campaign is more about making a connection than making a one stop sale. Think of it as a door to door salesperson selling pots and pans versus an insurance salesperson who just wants to get to know and protect you. Always put people first and they will respond positively.

Now, sending cold emails is old school. What works these days is to leverage one of two things:

1. A general feeling surrounding the market.

2. An influencer.

For #1, we can use the following example:

There is a lot of interest in machine learning. The market is feeling positive about it. People in the market want to learn ML. You happen to sell a course on learning ML. The focus would be on creating content around learning ML and offering additional value through a newsletter. You then reinforce your pitch on the newsletter.

For #2, it's a similar process. See below:

In this case, you'd hire / partner with someone known in a specific market. Let's use ML trainings again. Your job is to provide the influencer with an offer that is highly valuable to their audience. Then have the audience subscribe to your newsletter.

To put it into a concrete example: the influencer might do a daily live stream of them going through your ML course and provide buy it now links to the audience and a way to try out the materials themselves by joining your newsletter. That's it.

Email is still very alive and kicking.

Their phrase is “...could save you 15% or more,” which, incidentally, includes any potential savings between zero and one hundred percent.

Their catch phrase contains literally no information except a suggestion of 15%.

Agree completely. I wrote a follow-up post about the impact of writing shorter, more concise emails: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/increase-reply-rates/

Not surprisingly, those emails resulted in more responses than the long-winded ones.

I see in your case text was better performing than html, but I would not bet it's the same for everyone. It's just actually depends, and anyone with a simple A/B test will determine if text is better than email.

However the 5 reasons supporting text email are pretty wrong:

1) Poor rendering. Just use a good email editor, such beefree.io or others. Not a issue at all.

2) Mobile clients. Same as above

3) Email CSS. Same as above

4) Design effort. Yes, if you want a good result, you need a little effort. But if you rely just on text, you should put the same effort in choosing the best words. Consider than with a single Image you can communicate much more (and deeply) than with 20 lines of text.

5) Approval. Any communication department would require to approve email content, not only design.

Regarding the other reasons mentioned:

a) spam filters. Text doesn't change the inbox placement rate, the impact if any is below 0,001%, so totally irrelevant.

b) promotions tab. It actually depends on other variables, it's not a matter of text vs emails. If a transactional messages arrives in Promotions instead of Updates, you should fix the content (use a different IP/domain for transactional vs bulk), not the email format.

c) true, a template looks like something "bulk" or automated, while a simple text email may look like a personal direct email. Unless you want to cheat..