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Hey Marketing Bestie,

Today I learned there are good and bad types of cinnamon. Trust nobody.

Was this email forwarded to you?

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SPARKNOTES FROM THE POD

5 EMAIL MYTHS BUSTED

Naomi West got rejected from her university's marketing school three times. So she did a political science degree instead. Then worked in recruiting. Got bored. Took a side hustle doing email marketing.

She thought she discovered groundbreaking technology when she learned you could AUTOMATE emails. (Spoiler: That's just... email marketing.)

That was 2015. She's been obsessed ever since.

Now she's Senior Product Marketing Manager at Customer.io. She runs AB tests that destroy conventional email wisdom. She builds automations that get replies. And she spam-reports brands that ghost her for six months then send a random newsletter.

Her biggest lesson: Beautifully designed emails LOST to plain text. She spent a year dreaming about fancy gradient backgrounds and moving marquee text. Built them. Tested them. Text won on click-through AND conversion.
Plot twist: Simple emails work better.

Listen to the full episode here where Naomi breaks down why your fancy email design is probably broken, why open rates are lying to you, and why engineers will always ignore your Slack messages.

1️⃣. Your Fancy Email Design Is Probably Broken.

Naomi's Take: "A lot of email editors inside of marketing automation platforms are the bare minimum... Email is so limited in design capabilities... If that email goes to a spam folder or if that email goes to someone on a certain version of Outlook, none of those images are actually gonna load."

Here's what nobody tells you about email design: It's NOT web design.
You think it is. It looks similar. But it's absolutely not.

Custom fonts only work if you stick to the 6-8 system fonts that work everywhere. Gmail won't even load GOOGLE fonts. Your beautiful brand typography falls back to Arial or Helvetica.

GIFs don't work on Outlook. They only load the first frame. So that cute animation you spent hours on becomes a static image for half your audience.

Video can't play in emails. Period. You need a fake play button, link out to YouTube, and hope people click.

Rounded corners break on some Outlook versions unless you use VML (which you probably don't know how to code).

Naomi sees this constantly: Marketers spend DAYS building beautiful emails in their platform. Everything looks perfect in the builder. Then they send it.

Half the audience gets broken images. No text visible. Basically a blank email.
Why? Because they designed it like a website. Sliced images together. No fallback text. No consideration for different email clients.

Apple Mail. Gmail. Outlook. Yahoo. They all support DIFFERENT things. Your perfect design? Looks different (or broken) everywhere.

Takeaway: Stop trying to make your emails look like your website. Use text. Use system fonts (Arial, Helvetica, Georgia). Keep it simple. Test your emails in multiple clients BEFORE sending (use tools like Litmus or Email on Acid). If you must use images, always include alt text and fallback copy. Because half your audience probably isn't seeing what you think they're seeing.

2️⃣. Text-Based Emails Beat Fancy Design.

Naomi's Take: "We ran an AB test where we had variant A, which was the text-based automations going out... And then variant B, which was these like really cool emails that had dynamic content and gradient backgrounds and marquee texts... and the text base variant won for both click through rate as well as like conversion rate."

Naomi worked at an HTML coding platform for emails. They SHOULD have fancy emails, right. That's literally what they sell.

She dreamed about it for a year. Finally got a talented email developer (Mark Robbins) on the team. Built beautiful emails with gradients, moving text, dynamic content.

Ran the AB test. 3-email welcome series. 90 days. Good sample size.
Text emails won. Both CTR and conversion.

Her hypothesis: completely destroyed.

Here's why text works: It's FAST. She can ship same-day. No designer needed. No QA process. No "does this match brand guidelines" debates.

It's also what people expect. When you get a text-based email, it feels personal. Like someone actually wrote to you.

Fancy designed emails feel like marketing. Your brain goes "oh, another company trying to sell me something."

Also: Text emails never break. No images to load slowly. No fonts to fall back. No layouts to break on mobile.

Just. Words.

And words convert.

Takeaway: Try text-based emails for your next campaign. No images. No fancy formatting. Just solid copy with a clear CTA. Test it against your current "designed" template. Give it 90 days for a fair test (not one send). Track CTR and conversion (not opens). You might be surprised. And if text wins, you just saved your design team hundreds of hours.

3️⃣. Open Rates Are Vanity Metrics.

Naomi's Take: "Open rates are a vanity metric that is a hill I will die on... A lot of open rates are automated these days. iPhones for example, if you're running iOS 15 or above. Once an email lands in your Apple mail inbox, it's marked as opened because content is pre fetched on Apple mail now."

Senior execs LOVE asking "what's the open rate?" Naomi wants to reach through the screen and scream "NO. STOP."

Here's the problem: Open rates are fake.

Apple Mail (iOS 15+) pre-fetches content. Marks emails as "opened" before anyone reads them. Bots open emails. Security scanners open emails. Nobody actually READ the email, but it shows as opened.

Also: Naomi gets swimwear brand emails. Subject line says "50% off until end of day." She DELETES it without opening. Then at dinner, remembers the discount. Goes directly to the site. Buys a swimsuit.

The email worked. But open rate? 0.

Naomi also sees emails with the discount code in the PREVIEW TEXT. You don't even need to open it. You see the code, copy it, go to the site, buy.

Email worked. Conversion happened. Open rate? Didn't capture any of it.
Stop obsessing over opens. They don't tell you anything useful anymore.

Takeaway: Focus on click-through rate (if you have a CTA) and conversion rate (did they do the thing you wanted). Push your team to set up proper conversion tracking. Use tools like Mixpanel or Amplitude to build funnels from email click to actual conversion. Report on THAT. Not opens. And when an exec asks "what's the open rate," educate them on why that metric is broken. Show them CTR and conversion instead.

4️⃣. Relevancy Beats Everything.

Naomi's Take: "Relevancy is, is top of mind... There's a lot of brands out there that forget to create these like predictable touch points and just ghost subscribers for six months and then they're like, oh, I need to send a newsletter. They send the newsletter, I receive an email, and I'm like, what is this brand? I've never signed up to you. Spam."

Naomi's ruthless with her inbox. Brand ghosts her for six months then sends a random newsletter. Spam button. Doesn't even unsubscribe. Just marks it spam.

The reason: She forgot she signed up. The brand set ZERO expectations. No predictable cadence. Just... silence, then a random email.

That's not email marketing. That's annoying strangers.

Here's what works: Set expectations upfront. "We send weekly tips every Tuesday." Or "Monthly roundup on the first of the month." Or "Only when we launch something new."

Then STICK TO IT.

Naomi runs a newsletter called "Slow Emails." The name literally tells you it's unpredictable. She sets that expectation. So when she sends after six months, people aren't surprised.

But if you promise weekly and go silent for 3cmonths, you've broken trust. Your next email gets spam-marked.

Also: Relevancy means context. This person is getting THIS email RIGHT NOW for a reason. They just signed up. They abandoned their cart. They enabled a feature.

Event-triggered emails (based on what someone DID) always outperform batch-and-blast newsletters. Because they're RELEVANT.

Takeaway: Audit your email program. Do you have predictable touchpoints? Or do you ghost people for months then panic-send? Set a cadence you can actually maintain.

Weekly, biweekly, monthly-whatever works. Then TELL people what to expect in your welcome email. And stick to it. Also: Build more event-triggered emails based on actual user behavior. They'll always beat random newsletters.

5️⃣. Make Email A Two-Way Street.

Naomi's Take: "My stance on email marketing is it has to be a two-way street. I have gathered so much valuable feedback from users over the years when they reply to my emails... My main goal is attempting to get them to use the server for the very first time... The follow-ups, I wanna know how their experience was."

A lot of brands send emails FROM a no-reply address. Or they never read replies. Or they don't encourage feedback.

Huge mistake.

Naomi's approach: Every email she sends invites replies. "How'd the experience go. Was there anything you wished you could do."

Real example: Customer.io launched an MCP server (connects Claude/ChatGPT to their platform). Naomi's automation:

Email 1: Congrats on enabling the server. Here's how to use it. Reply with feedback.
Email 2 (3-7 days later): How'd it go. What worked. What didn't.

She gets INCREDIBLE feedback this way. Users tell her what's broken. What's confusing. What features they need.

That feedback goes straight to product. To engineering. To the roadmap.
You can't get that from open rates. Or CTR. You get it from CONVERSATIONS.

Also: 2-way emails feel human. When someone can actually reply and get a response, they trust you more. They engage more. They stick around longer.

1-way broadcast emails feel like spam.

Even if they're not.

Takeaway: Stop sending from no-reply addresses. Use a real email someone monitors. End your emails with a question. "How's this working for you" or "What would make this better" or "Hit reply and let me know." Then actually READ the replies.

Forward them to product. To sales. To leadership. User feedback from email replies is some of the most valuable data you'll ever get. Don't waste it.

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IN A MEME