See the big blank box in the screenshot above? That's supposed to be a massive image of something, in an email "newsletter" I received.
And it's missing because I deliberately turn off images in the email from automatically loading, because I don't want to be tracked, you know? They may be tracking a lot more than just open rates, and I'm not taking that chance.
95% of email newsletters I subscribe to these days are practically unreadable, what with large images, unnecessarily fancy design, and read like a mini-book scrolling 30 pages long. It’s like I’m being assigned a 2-hour project at work (from back when I had a job).
Plus because the images are turned off, there's no way to know what the email was about, because there's hardly any text. And the minimal text that's there is not enough to get me to keep reading. So I end up unsubscribing to a majority of these emails, even if it's from service providers I'm doing business with.
Don’t make it a chore/pain for me where I keep skipping it and putting it in a folder, thinking I’ll come back to it later (hint: almost no one ever comes back to it).
It doesn’t have to be short, but write to me like you’re my trusted friend & adviser, like you value me, like I’m a person (which I am, by the way) - and not like you’re Google News who has to my news source for everything in your niche.
Be sure to test your email by sending it to yourself, and try reading it with the image-autoloading turned off in your email client. If you can't read and enjoy 90% of it without images, then neither can your readers. And that's one surefire way to lose a lot of subscribers over time.
