Here’s a very straightforward test to gauge how differentiated your email marketing is – i.e. how much you do/don’t stand out compared to competition:
Visit the following websites (in this order):
- Nike
- Starbucks
- Walmart
- Chipotle
- Berkshire Hathaway
When you have?
Note down which one stood out the most.
Unless your pattern-recognition software is running Windows XP…
It was Berkshire’s website.
Why?
Because it’s uglier than your mom.
Not only does it have zero images… not only is the background plain white… the entire website has LESS than 200 words!
(196 if my word counter is correct.)
If I took a screenshot of all of them and put them side by side…
Berkshire’s would stick out like a nun in a brothel.
You may disagree with their design… you may not like it… you may even call it unprofessional…
But you have to remember something:
Your stance ultimately doesn’t matter.
What matters is what WORKS in getting you to stand out.
Isn’t that the entire point of marketing in the first place?
Seems to be a pretty unpopular opinion in the ChatGPTanese era that’s making everyone sound the same…
(Or so eerily similar it might as well be the same.)
Doesn’t just copying what everyone else is doing, with minimal variation, go completely against that?
(“Marketing-incest” is my usual term for this.)
This is the logic behind my ugly, plain-text emails:
If virtually the entire supplement industry is sending these pretty-poster emails full of fancy HTML graphics…
…and I’m sending ugly plain-text emails…
My emails stand out like a stick in the mud.
I even have a side-by-side comparison of this inside my book (Blind Spot #4) that REALLY drives this home.
Now…
There are two kinds of people reading this email:
One group shrugs this off because it’s “unprofessional” and “ugly” and “emails need to be pretty”…
(Reminds me a bit of the guy I worked with back in my ad agency days…)
The other group can get over their biases, prejudices and most notably of all…
Ego.
…so they can grasp the absolute differentiation benefits this approach brings.
If you’re the former?
Then put this email on the shelf for some other time.
(Although if a $1 Trillion publicly-traded company can get over this incessant need to prettify everything just to “fit in”… then you can too – but I guess you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it, don’t give yourself acid reflux over it.)
If you’re the latter?
[Part of this email’s content has been removed from this Email Echoes version of it.]
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