Don’t Design Your Emails

I do hate HTML emails with passion.  They are always too heavy, often bloated, render horrible, and just plain annoying.  I miss the old good days, when email clients were warning users that their signature was too long, spanning more than 4 lines.  Today, everybody is sending out HTML emails whether they need to or not.  Whether it’s for the signatures, corporate branding, or the “marketing value” or the “professional look”.

Finally, there is someone on my side of the fence, who actually tested the effects of HTML emails and suggests that plain emails are more efficient even for the marketing purposes.  Read the whole thing – “Don’t Design Your Emails“, especially if you are involved with email marketing.

The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email.

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The plain, unstyled emails resulted in more opens, clicks, replies, and conversions, every time.

Replies to welcome emails were tripled. Cold emails were getting 30-35% open rates and 3% conversion rates, which is incredible.

MailChimp vs. Amazon SES + Mailwizz

Here’s an interesting story of moving away from MailChimp to a combined setup of Amazon SES and MailWizz, which resulted in overall 92% reduction of the monthly bill.  Given it’s not the same functionality, but if you are technical enough and your requirements are simpler than all the functionality of the MailChimp, this looks like a good alternative.

Effective Presentations Using Applied Logical Fallacies

Effective Presentations Using Applied Logical Fallacies” is yet another reminder of logical fallacies, brain shortcuts, and psychological misbehavior that is often taken advantage of by speakers, presenters, and other people trying to convince an audience of something.