[contravariant]

Normally you'd think the burden of proof would be on the side requesting considerable resources and infrastructure to send something that doesn't render properly under the most basic privacy settings and cannot be displayed text-only (like in notifications).

[passivate]

Normally I would agree with this sentiment, but what kind of proof are you looking for here? We're not discussing logical absolutes or claims of absolute fact! We're discussing peoples preferences - what they like and/or expect an engaging email to look like. This area is highly subjective and contextual (culture, region, age, demo, etc). Neither your nor OPs experiences invalidate each other. Both of you can be correct at the same time.

Personally, I've seen engagement metrics increase when marketing added more "fluff" to their emails. Its no different than those obnoxious thumbnails people use on YT - it works - maybe accidentally, but it does, for now. That may change at any time in the future, just like what people like to see in emails/magazines/brochures is bound to change in the future.

[contravariant]

Sure if you just prefer if your emails look a certain way then there's no point in discussing proof, just do the thing you like.

However if the discussion is whether you should just send plaintext emails or use a complicated and/or expensive tool to send out fancy emails then the more time/money consuming side has more to prove.

Given that the first few replies I got were essentially "Well I assume somebody checked this", I'm not sure the assumption that fancier emails are necessarily better has been questioned enough.

I'm also reminded of several articles where online marketing itself turned out to be nowhere near as effective as people think. [1,2]

[1]: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873

[passivate]

>However if the discussion is whether you should just send plaintext emails or use a complicated and/or expensive tool to send out fancy emails then the more time/money consuming side has more to prove.

I am curious, how many plaintext emails do you receive as a percentage? I don't receive any so maybe my opinion is colored by that fact.

>Given that the first few replies I got were essentially "Well I assume somebody checked this", I'm not sure the assumption that fancier emails are necessarily better has been questioned enough.

I'm 100% with you that conventional wisdom should attract scrutiny from time to time, and I don't mean to discourage that. My only point was that there is nothing to "prove" here. Marketing styles/trends/methods are not linked so neatly and linearly that we can test individual elements by scientific method. There are far too many variables. I think it is natural that each company wants to be able to choose the font, add graphics to make the email attractive, add tracking pixels to measure performance, etc. Its sort of become the default. So maybe the question really is what do you stand to gain by removing all that?

>I'm also reminded of several articles where online marketing itself turned out to be nowhere near as effective as people think. [1,2]

Heh, maybe marketing was never as effective as people claimed, its that now we have the tools & metrics to detect just how bad it is. :)

[anamexis]

I would assume that side has, in fact, established that proof.

[TrueDuality]

I'm also going to make a pretty big assumption, which is that a lot of people using mailing tools that give them stats such as MailChimp do not think about how privacy settings affect their metrics. If I have images disabled by default I will almost certainly never show up in an "opened" metric.

Images off by default is becoming more common.

[contravariant]

It's a common assumption, but also a dangerous assumption when the people who you assume have established the proof are the same people who stand to profit a from it being proven.

[anamexis]

I'm not sure I follow - if marketers proved that plain text emails are more profitable, they would use plain text emails.

[hedora]

They certainly haven’t proven its efficacy to the people whose resources are being consumed.