AP 0061: Email Marketing: Email Templates vs. Text Only, Which Is Better?

AskPat 61 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 61 of AskPat. I'm here to help you, as always, by answering your online business questions. We have a great question today from Brent about email marketing.

Before we get to that, and speaking of email, I'd like to welcome and also give a shout out to today's new sponsor, which is AWeber. AWeber is sponsoring AskPat now, which is awesome, because I use AWeber. I've used AWeber for years to help me with my email marketing and sending out newsletters and broadcasts to all my subscribers. I cannot recommend them enough. If you go to AWeber.com/askpat, that's my referral link. You'll also get a $1, 30-day free trial to check it out. Again, that's AWeber, an amazing email marketing service that I use and highly recommend.

Now, let's get to today's email-type question from Brent.

Brent: Hey, Pat. Tis is Brent from EdTech.TV. I am working on being a little bit better with my mailing list. One thing that I noticed is that services like AWeber or MailChimp, they give you all these beautiful designs, but most marketers only use just simple text. I'm wondering which is better, why I use simple text instead of all the pretty graphics and everything like that? Is there a reason that people choose to do it that way? Thanks for everything. I hope you're doing well.

Pat Flynn: Brent, thank you so much for your question today. It's a really good question. It's actually one that I get quite often when I get in deep conversation with people about email marketing. And I do. When I talk to people, there are those deep conversations about nerdy things like email marketing. A lot of people ask me, Pat, why do you only choose to use text only in your emails? Yes we all have the option to create fancy graphics, and I have a logo that I could possibly include in my emails. I could create a background with a little box where my content would be, and make it much more fancy and pretty, but I choose not to do that.

Well, why? Well, I choose to do that because of the brand that I'm trying to create. I'm trying to create a brand on SmartPassiveIncome.com, where I have that list of about 75,000 right now. I'm trying to create a brand where people feel like they have a connection with me; from a friend to a friend. I'm trying to email my audience as if I am a friend, which I feel like I am. I'm trying to treat my audience like they're my friends. Think about it. When you get an email from a friend, or a family member, somebody really close to you, they typically don't have those fancy headers and graphics. They typically don't even have the images of the icons of their social media accounts at the bottom, which you often see in a lot of emails. I don't include that. I don't include any of that. Now, they are still html emails. The purpose of that is so that I can track clicks on links, because those email service providers, they only track with the html because it uses a little tiny one-pixel graphic to sort of track all that stuff. You don't need to worry about that right now.

As far as how it looks, that's the brand I'm trying to create, from a friend to a friend, where it just goes right into the text. Now, that's not to say people who are using images and graphics in their emails, that they're doing it wrong. They perhaps are trying to create a different kind of brand or have a different kind of feel with the emails they send out. Brent, the emails that you're going to send out to your audience, you might want to ask yourself, well, what kind of email do you want to send? Do you want to send a very professional-looking email to your audience, and they perceive you as being professional and maybe as a company as opposed to Brent? In that case, using a header and fancy graphics might make more sense. However, if you're trying to be more “Hey, guys. This is Brent here. Here's what's going on,” a more personal email might make more sense and have a better effect as far as open rates, as far as reading, and also responding and engaging as well. I, typically, when I see those emails with headers and they look fancy, to me, they look like they're coming from a company. I won't ever respond. I don't ever reply to those. Typically, we're almost trained at this point to perceive those types of emails as ones that you're not supposed to reply to. Sometimes you even see them that say, [email protected] whatever the website is. You definitely don't want to create that type of email. If you're sending emails out to your audience and it says no-reply, what kind of company, or business, or brand are you trying to create? Hey, guys. Here's an email. I'm contacting you, but don't contact me. Don't do that.

Anyway, Brent, getting back to your question, the reason I do it without using any images is because that's the type of brand I'm trying to create, from a friend to a friend. Think about your business and the type of brand you are trying to create. What kind of emails work best for you? Now, there are some talks on Smart Passive Income, actually, and a recent guest post about emails and using images versus not using images, I had a guest post on. The guest poster had a great point that my emails were getting through in the Gmail email sort of account into the primary tab, while others who are using images were getting put into the promotional tab. So for those of you who don't know what's going on, Gmail, if you use Gmail, or anybody who uses Gmail, they have three tabs now. They're trying to help filter and separate emails. There's the primary tab, there's the Social tab, and the Promotional tab. This person who wrote a guest post said that my emails, as opposed to Michael Hyatt's emails, and Amy Porterfield's emails, among many others, are going into the primary tab. Those other ones are going into the promotional tab. Both of those have images and graphics.
There's a lot of discussion there. I recommend reading the comments, because it's actually a really good discussion that would take my answer here to the next level. So, if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com you'll find it there.

Going back to your question, again, it's up to you. I would do some tests, maybe send an email to a segment. Actually, this would be a good thing to do, Brent. I would craft an email, and I would split it into two tests. You can split-test your emails. What it does is divide your email list in half, and it sends version 1 to list A, or the first half, and version 2 of your email to list B, or the second half. What I would do is actually have a link in there so you know what people are clicking on for both of them. Same exact content, except it just looks different. One of them is just regular text. The other one has the graphics and visuals that you potentially want to use. See which one responds better with your audience. Send out that email, and you'll be able to see exactly what the numbers tell you. Then you wont have to guess anymore. You'll know which one works best, and from that point forward you can do whatever works best for everybody.

So, Brent, I hope that answers your question. Thank you so much for it, and I'm going to send you an AskPat t-shirt as a result of your question being featured here on the show. Of course, I want to give a huge shout out to Greg, over at SuccessShirt.com. That's where those shirts are coming from. Go to SuccessShirt.com right now; you'll see the AskPat t-shirt for sale, if you kind of really want to get it right now. There's other t-shirts from John Lee Dumas on Entrepreneur On Fire. So again, SuccessShirt.com; it's a great site.

I also want to give a shoutout, since this is related to email, to AWeber. AWeber is one of those companies that I just love, because they're just good people. I've met them in person at conferences. It's an email marketing service that makes it nice and easy to build a list on your site, which is something I wish I had done sooner. I've made that mistake twice with two of the first businesses I started, and I regret it like mad. Now that I have an email list, I'm so happy because I can use AWeber to email everybody, and also create an autoresponder that allows me to keep in constant contact with everybody for almost an entire year without me having to do any work, 'cause I already crafted those pre-written emails upfront. Again, AWeber.com/askpat to go ahead and get your free trial there. Thank you so much, AWeber.

I'm going to leave you with a quote. This is a Pat Flynn original, coming and stemming out of today's episode. That is, “Emails are personal connections. The more personal they look, the more they'll be opened, read, and remembered.” That's my opinion. What's yours? Head on over to AskPat.com, check out the rest of the episodes, and I'll see you in the next one.