How to make your emails feel (legally & ethically) mildly narcotic…

Steve Murphy and Javier Pena were DEA agents who spearheaded the hunt for Pablo Escobar.

For years they tracked his every move… watched the carnage pile up… and gradually built Escobar into this almost mythical figure in their minds – a devil incarnate in human form.

But when it finally came down to it?

It was pretty disappointing.

Season 2 finale of the Narcos TV show (whose first two seasons revolved entirely around Escobar) said it pretty well:

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STEVE MURPHY: All that time hunting him, and just like that I’m looking down at Pablo fucking Escobar. For years I’d been building this son of a bitch up in my head – what a monster he’d be. But here’s the thing: when you lay eyes on him? The devil’s a real letdown. Beard grows if he doesn’t shave. Fat and shoeless. Just a man.

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Spielberg’s mega-hit “Jaws” springs to mind:

They had problems with the shark animatronic on set constantly breaking down…

So Spielberg made a directorial pivot:

They were going to hide this malfunctioning shark – for as much of the runtime as possible – in order to get the movie done on time & budget.

It ended up saving Spielberg’s career.

(He said it himself actually – Jaws was his make-or-break movie.)

Because the shark being hidden created a sense of atmosphere & dread that wouldn’t have EVER been possible to achieve…

…if the audience saw this goofy robot shark for most of the runtime.

And this phenomenon has actually been studied:

Whatever image YOU can conjure up in your mind based on your own feelings/experience/worldview/beliefs/imagination etc…

…is magnitudes more potent than whatever your eyes can see.

(Another good example is the torture scene in Villeneuve’s Sicario – just look at the comments under that YouTube video.)

Which brings me to the subject of HTML images/graphics in emails:

When you’re doing nothing more than writing the story… writing the plot… writing the email…

…you have nigh infinitely more control than putting up some fancy image/graphic – where you’re giving up complete control of what someone’s impression/feelings are going to be.

(As opposed to SHAPING their feelings and impression through the copy and the writing.)

So the next time you think of running an email where you’re just putting up a fancy AI-generated graphic of a pre-workout?

Consider the opposite:

• Describe to them how they’ll FEEL when they take that pre-workout…
• Describe to them how they’ll get a skin-tearing pump…
• Describe to them how they’ll feel like Goku going Super Saiyan for the very first time…
• Describe to them, in vivid detail, how they’ll finally crush that damn bench PR…

Try this out and see what happens.

IF FOR ANYTHING…

Then simply for the fact you’ll probably land in the primary tab.

(Avoiding the dreaded endless void known as spam/promotions.)

How?

Because images/graphics – and the more you have them – severely damage your deliverability.

(A metric which determines in which tab to land your email in – primary, spam, junk, promo, etc…)

This doesn’t even touch on how differentiated your email will come across:

If 99% of marketing emails your average customer sees – from you AND your competitors – are full of images?

What happens when he sees a plain-text email for the first time?

It’s a pattern interrupt, and those get remembered.

If you do it like everyone else?

Not only are you degrading your unique value by showing up that way…

…but you’re also inviting competition for attention that you could completely avoid if you just thought long and deep enough to come up with a plain-text email plan.

But that’s a story for another day.

(Or today, if you go over the Blind Spot #3 chapter inside my book.)

Whatever the case:

My Email Storyselling method takes all of the above into account.

(And then some – see my entire book.)

And, admittedly, it is a lot to think about when sending just one simple email…