I wasted hundreds of hours on these email marketing tactics

Writing a direct response newsletter is easy… and hard.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

All you have to do is… tell a story about your business, make an offer, and press send. And yet, email marketing gurus and software providers overcomplicate it with shiny objects.

I ran after a few of these objects over the years.

Here are some fancy email marketing tactics you’ll find gurus preaching about. I no longer use them. They cost me time, creative energy, and moolah. I tell clients to avoid them, too.

Fancy Branded Templates

​I’ve spent a few hundred dollars on fancy email templates. I’ve also tested and customized templates inside of Kit, MailChimp, and other email marketing tools.

Templates are helpful if you want to share a lot of content as part of a weekly digest, such as a series of blog posts, YouTube videos, and podcasts. They’re de rigueur if you’re running a fancy ecomm newsletter with strict brand guidelines.

For most creators, it’s overkill. Your time is better spent writing an email than trying to shoehorn content and links into a design. Substack doesn’t offer template customization and for good reason. Simplification wins.