Extreme Couponing 🎫 Google Edition

GM! Paperboy here 🗞️

Here are a few brands I’ve been inspired by this week: 1, 2, 3, 4. Looking for inspo? Email me your brand/category and I’ll send you a few brands in your niche.

Today’s email is for all my image-based senders.

A mid-7-figure makeup brand operator recently asked me, “How do I get the little coupon to show up at the top of my emails?”

I took a look at their emails and noticed two things:

• All of their emails were image-based

• None of their promo emails had offer disclaimers in the footer

While I’m sure Google can read images in our image-based emails, right now I don’t believe they are. More on that later.

For now, the fix is very simple.

At the bottom of your emails, throw in a disclaimer with info about your sale. It won’t always work, but over time you should start to see your discount codes populate.

Don’t just call out the terms of the sale. Mention the exact discount code. No human will read it. But the robots will.

This is just an example disclaimer below, not legal advice. Every region has different rules.

But do I want my discount clipped?

Hate to break this to you but... it’s not really up to you.

Sure, in the short term you can avoid doing the above and Google won’t surface it.

But sooner or later Google will start scraping this info from images in our emails.

Why? Because they can charge us ad $s to surface our promos higher or outside of the promo tab in Gmail… Fun I know.

To answer the original question though, I think you should consider your audience.

• If you have a generic sale email that just calls out the offer and doesn’t spotlight any important content, who cares. Let them surface the code.

• If you have a big launch or some piece of information you really want people to see, maybe try to avoid Google surfacing your code.

Either way you lean, you could AB test this. Just take out the disclaimer in one half of the emails and make sure the code itself isn’t mentioned.

Another important thing to note: if you don’t use coupon codes, you lose the ability to use this feature.

Image-based food for thought

Google is in an arms race with ChatGPT, Anthropic, and all the other big tech co’s to build the best AI models out there.

These models take up a TON of computing power.

Google would much rather allocate computing power to AI than to surfacing 12mb emails for ecommerce brands.

From all the deliverability experts I’ve spoken to in the last couple months, each one has warned me that sending big image-based emails is going to get riskier and riskier.

This is a warning - you should be keeping your images on the smaller end (sub 250kb, ideally sub 100kb each). Same goes for GIFs. Image dimensions matter. And long emails will get clipped.

We’re doing a lot of testing around this at our agency and deploying best practices across our clients. It’s especially tricky because Gmail is rewriting the rules every 3-6 months.

And please test your image-based emails

With Google caring about email size more than ever, you should be AB testing the length of your emails.

It also goes without saying:

No matter how good of a copywriter you think you are, you should be testing to see if your longer content is getting read.

Split out 10 or 20% of your audience over a 1-month period and send them the shorter emails. See if individual email revenue changes, but also whether LTV is impacted.

There are so many reasons to avoid sending super long emails. Team capacity, email size, customers closing the email out of boredom, clipping, etc. Be very confident about your strategy if that’s the direction you choose.

Need help with your Klaviyo account?

We’re opening up a couple of spots for new clients at Bedford. If you’re a 7 or 8-figure growing brand looking for support, book a free discovery call with me today!

Post 4th of July Meme:

That’s all for now,
Paperboy 🗞

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I use AfterSell with 7 and 8-figure brands at my agency. I would never promote a product I don’t personally use.