You're probably not a user of the average PC and internet connection out there. On low-tier equipment well-designed can turn very quickly into utterly frustrating.
But you are right about the last part...when the user's UI locks up for a few seconds your email is certain to grab their attention. Just not in the way your carefully designed newsletter was intended to be remembered, though.
Plain text mails work better in every possible situation and are guaranteed to be formatted in a readable way. Meanwhile your average marketing newsletter is almost guaranteed to not be displayed in the correct manner as most decent email clients will just outright block any image content by default, and if your designer had the bright idea to also embed all text in images so their carefully selected font looks nice everywhere, well, I can't see anything without manually enabling pictures and then waiting 5+ seconds to see what the email is even about. And why would I do that?
Not to be overly cynical, but are people with low-tier equipment the ones that marketers usually care about?
It’s not really about what ”works best” for the average recipient, because these emails are not sent out of the goodness of the senders’ hearts. If data show that fancy HTML emails translate into more paying customers, then that’s what drives these decisions.
It’s of course possible that this is not the case, however to be convinced of that I’d like to see the stats rather than speculation based on individual people’s subjective experience. And naturally it can depend on the product and target demographics, too.
> Not to be overly cynical, but are people with low-tier equipment the ones that marketers usually care about?
Yes - they generally are. Sure the newest SV ETL pipeline might be catered towards folks with up-to-date hardware, but most marketing is directed toward having a large reach and you'll find that the distribution of gullible people is pretty even society wide - and so those low performance having folk actually do compose a fair chunk of the intended audience.
I don't like the argument about not being the "average consumer". Just because you're smarter at detecting & filtering out marketer's bullshit doesn't make it okay to keep perpetuating the problem because others aren't.
If you deem the behavior nefarious or annoying it's not fair to justify inflicting it on someone else because they're not savvy enough to recognize/filter it.
It does though. Email marketing is all about crafting a message that gets the highest conversion rate and the rates are already pretty low. So if a blinking gif annoys most of your users, but the response rate goes from 3% to 4% it's a win for the sender.
But you are right about the last part...when the user's UI locks up for a few seconds your email is certain to grab their attention. Just not in the way your carefully designed newsletter was intended to be remembered, though.
Plain text mails work better in every possible situation and are guaranteed to be formatted in a readable way. Meanwhile your average marketing newsletter is almost guaranteed to not be displayed in the correct manner as most decent email clients will just outright block any image content by default, and if your designer had the bright idea to also embed all text in images so their carefully selected font looks nice everywhere, well, I can't see anything without manually enabling pictures and then waiting 5+ seconds to see what the email is even about. And why would I do that?