Image-heavy emails are NOT as stimulating as you may think…

I’ve been driving around more frequently as of late.

So to kill the time – but while still doing something productive – I decided to read/listen to the entirety of Stephen King’s „Misery“.

Now yesterday, after recently finishing the entire book…

… I decided it would be fun to watch the movie version of it.

How disappointed I was.

I was bitterly disappointed in how the movie just casually touched on the degree of psychological torture that was involved.

The book was just far far far more effective than the movie ever could be.

Here’s my theory why that is:

When you read a book? There are no pictures. There is no imagery. There is no: „This is what Annie looks like…“

No.

There is only YOUR interpretation. There’s the curiosity & the intrigue element…

… which you build in your own mind as you visualise what you’re reading.

And because of it?

The storytselling power is just so much more powerful.

I can’t think of a better example than the movie „Jaws“:

There was no CGI back then – so they had to use this handmade animatronic shark for the film…

The problem?

It kept breaking and malfunctioning. So they had to get creative using it:

Instead of showing the shark in full view…

… it was kept hidden for most of the film.

In fact:

Those shots of the shark’s perspective from underwater?

They created a sense of atmosphere and dread which they could NEVER possibly achieve… if they just simply showed the shark above water.

So what initially started out as a pain-in-the-neck and a nightmare…

Ended up being a total blessing in disguise.

(And probably saved Spielberg’s career – he himself said that movie flopping would have probably ended his career right then and there.)

From my perspective, this just says everything:

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

You have SO MUCH more control than putting up some image/graphic – where you’re essentially just giving up complete control of what someone’s impression and 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 some fancy graphic of a pre-workout?

Don’t.

Do 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 that you’ll probably land in their primary tab – instead of the spam/promotions tab.

How/why?

Well…

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

(i.e. deliverability is basically a metric which determines in which tab to land your email in – primary, spam, junk, promo etc…)

There really is no upside to rolling with the catalogue-style image-heavy emails…

(I didn’t even mention how hurtful they are for your differentiation – since everyone does this…)

So consider joining the “dark side“:

The plain-text crowd.

If you are keen on joining the “dark side”…