We all have a mental image of what the perfect email looks like. It’s sleek, it’s beautiful and it makes us crave the product or service being presented. Most of us have seen the posh Apple emails or Betty Crocker’s mouthwatering email masterpieces. They are the gold standard that everyone wants to live up, to but I would never in a million years recommend to one of my clients to copy those emails.

Why?

My clients aren’t household names. My clients aren’t branding – they’re selling. If you are not trying to make money off your emails, I say go ahead and make them as pretty as you want! Have a ball! If, however, your goal is to maximize your ROI and get people clicking, buying, filling out lead forms or making a phone call, then ugly is what you really want. I’m not saying that your email should repulse, offend or have some ridiculous color scheme; I am just saying you want to avoid the temptation to create some household -name, beautiful-branding wanna be email campaign.

The majority of those beautifully crafted email campaigns are almost all images. According to MarketingSherpa, 66% of people have images turned off in their email programs by default. If you are a household name, or you have a constant 70% open rate, then you can pull that off. Otherwise you are sending your subscribers an email of big red X’s. If you want people to turn on your images, they need to see some content that appeals to them first. Firefox has a plug-in called Image-Show-Hide that will let you turn off images in your browser. See what the emails look like with images off during the design phase so you don’t waste your time making edits once you finally see it with images off during testing. Make sure your email conveys your message just as well with the images turned off as it does with them turned on.

Secondly, do you want people to look at your email or do you want them to click and convert? You have about 3 seconds to get their attention and make them want more or you’ll miss that conversion. How do you get people to convert? A good value proposition and a well-placed call to action! If people are concentrating on your pretty images, they are more likely to miss your call to action.

We recently ran a test on email navigation. Version A had plan old HTML text links to different conversion pages. Version B had beautifully crafted, eye-catching buttons for each one of those same links. Guess what? Version A’s boring text links blew away the colorful images in version B. It received 16% more clicks than the prettier version. Imagine how much more money you could make if you had 16% more traffic coming in from your emails?

It’s been tested a million times, and the way your email looks matters a lot less than you think when it comes to making you money. Even though all it takes is a simple A/B test to realize the power of uglying up your email, there are still very few people doing it. Test it already!

When clients come to us on a performance basis they picture that perfect email template. When we present them with our idea they can often be confused by the direction we take them in. It takes those clients longer to take off because we end up having to first test the pretty email they want against the one we know will convert.

Rest assured that the perfect email you are picturing in your mind and the plain Jane email that brings you the most wealth are not one and the same.