Plaintext beat our image emails on every metric except one

Happy Wednesday.

One of our account managers ran a test this week that broke an assumption every retention agency, including ours, has been operating on for years. The takeaway most people are running with is the wrong one.

The setup was simple. We pulled a 30-day window on a larger client account and compared plaintext-style emails against image-heavy campaigns with full design systems. Same campaigns, same audiences, same send cadence.

Plaintext won on opens. Plaintext won on clicks. Sometimes plaintext won on conversion too.

My LinkedIn feed this week is full of "plaintext is more personal, send everything plaintext." That's the lazy read. The WHAT without the WHY.

Why opens lifted

Image-heavy emails always land in Promotions. Plaintext sometimes lands in Primary.

That "sometimes" is what raised the open baseline. It's a deliverability quirk, not a copy revelation.

The open lift wasn't plaintext being more personal. It was plaintext occasionally bypassing the Promotions tab while image-heavy never did.

Why clicks lifted

The clicks lift has nothing to do with deliverability. Every inbox your subscribers open is a wall of image-heavy campaigns from every brand they buy from.

Plaintext interrupts the pattern. People read it because it doesn't look like everything else.

Run the experiment in reverse and it falls apart. Send plaintext for two months, then drop one image-heavy in the middle.

The image-heavy wins on clicks. Same mechanic, opposite direction.

The lever was never plaintext. The lever is contrast against whatever your audience is currently tuned out to.

What conversion tells you

Once both groups land at checkout, the conversion math is mostly identical. The email decides who shows up. It doesn't decide who buys.

So plaintext-by-default isn't a permanent win. It's a placement quirk plus a contrast moment, and both fade the second every brand follows the trend.

What we're rolling into May

Don't default to plaintext for everything. That makes plaintext the new wall.

The smarter rule: rotate. Watch what your audience is currently saturated with, and break that pattern.

For most accounts that means more plaintext right now. For accounts that have already gone text-heavy, image-heavy starts winning again.

If you want us to audit your cadence and walk you through our Contrast playbook, book a free 15-minute call. We'll look at your last 30 days of sends and tell you exactly where to break the pattern.

Or just reply to this email. I read every one.

Have a great week. Go figure out what your audience is currently tuned out to.

- Raymond