Is the daily-ish ready to be media rich?

We tried to make the daily-ish media rich in the past and then moved back to text only. I cannot remember exactly why we reverted to text only.

I wonder if we would get more velocity if the daily-ish was media rich.

I use an extension for chrome that allows to save online articles to my Kobo. I am also subscribed to their mailing list and their emails look something like this:

I think what I find key here is that there are images. A title for each item so I can quickly decide if I want to read the more detailed description.

Thoughts?

In general I do not see media-rich emails, due to a series of conservative choices on my part.  My particular combination of email client and security software default settings do not allow much display of non-text content (due to abuses like tracking pixels) unless I hit various buttons designed to whitelist media content from trusted parties.  Although Permies would certainly be one such, I typically don't jump through the hoops necessary to allow media unless I'm pretty highly motivated to receive media-rich emails.  I mention all of this not because I think my curmudgeonly ways should matter to the decision, but to illustrate one potential problem with media-rich emails: including the media has the potential to reduce the number of people who actually see/view/engage with the mail.  

In general I think best practice for emails is to keep them as simple as possible.  Text and links remain the universal common denominator that everybody can receive, view, and interact with.  Every media-rich feature you add, subtracts some percentage of users from the universe of people who will be able to receive/view/interact.  So I think it's important to be very clear about what are the benefits to the sender that outweigh the inevitable loss of reach.  

Just my two cents!

It seems that every newsletters I am subscribed to now is media-rich. I know they track if I open it and if I click on the link, but that seems fairly benign especially if I find value in the newsletter (which I don't always, for instance the article Pocket sent lately annoyed me).

Dan Boone wrote:Just my two cents!

Thankfully one can send a multi-part email that contains both rich- and plain-text bodies!

I prefer the plain text.  I can see how it might be good for folks that are not regulars.  Could you have an option when folks sign up for the daily-ish?  Like a box to check for plain text or media rich.

Interesting idea.  I'm not dismissing it out of hand and am open to considering it further.

However, these are the thoughts that immediately pop into my mind when I think about that idea:

I think having a text only daily-ish is a perfect match for this community.

Some perhaps many of our readers are off grid on limited internet
everyone else is doing pictures - it makes us stand out better
I personally don't load media rich emails - they go directly in the trash
I'm lazy and don't like the idea of composing a media-rich email, every single day, especially since that's not the kind of email I read. (so we would need an easy way to make it media rich that doesn't seem like work)

We have a thread somewhere that Cassie did that asked the community what they wanted.  The overwhelming answer was for text only.  


What I would love to do is to have a simple email and then the threads themselves be media rich.  I know when I'm choosing threads for the daily-ish email, ones with pictures, links and other goodies are more likely to be chosen.  

Now, for the weekly-ish and monthly-ish... there's a great opportunity there to make them media rich.

Ok, let's stick to the plain text.

I am like a luddite. My security settings also remove media from emails before I see them.