Authentic vs. HTML

I recently had drinks with a profound marketing guru in Nashville. He had gone through the ranks of the agency life and is now starting his own shop after spending a majority of his career in places such as Chicago, London and New York.

About an hour into our conversation, we found ourselves discussing the current trends in our marketing world.

He gave a lot of insight into a new trend he referred to as influencer marketing. He firmly believes this is where brands will be putting a majority of their funding in the coming years.

As the conversation continued, we began talking about trends, how long their shelf life is, and how one notices a trend. Through this we both noticed the common denominator of authenticity.

Other words one may consider synonymous with this are genuine, transparent and trusted.

Why is it we are more inclined to trust say, Tim Ferriss over some celeb endorsed product? It’s mainly due to the fact that Tim has built credibility not only to myself but to thousands, possibly millions, of others in the world vs. a celeb whose twitter following is composed of bots and not actual devoted fans.

The example he gave was Kylie Jenner. Currently sitting at 15.9 million twitter followers.

Would you pay her x amount to endorse your product?

The answer is you wouldn’t because in reality, a majority of those followers are either bots or un-devoted fans. I.e. not a true following.

Influencer marketing is based on this principle:

Influencers are not influencers because they have a big audience. They are influencers because they are trusted sources.

The size of the influencer varies, but the overall concept does not.

So let’s relate this back to the email marketing context of which I am heavily involved in.

As an email marketer it’s easy to become obsessed with HTML. The better designed, the better you feel, the better it performs right?

Unfortunately no, that’s just not what people are attracted to.

People want authentic. They want to feel like the message is personal and catered to them. They see that first header image and stop because they know everyone got the exact same message.

Compare that to a plain text email or personalized one and there’s the off chance that it is meant just for them. Making it more likely for them to read and buy into what you are talking about.

This isn’t to say images or HTML is the devil, don’t let that be your main take away. The take away should be this.

It’s not about if we can convince an audience that this or that is the next best thing, it’s about whether or not we can show them we are genuine, real…authentic.

So where does that leave us? How do we become a trusted influencer in a loud, {insert social platform}—famous world? How do we email authentically?

Honestly, I believe the overall concept is quite simple.

The more we give and the less we ask, the more we’ll get in return. The end goal doesn’t change, but how we get there does. How we get there can vary and be a bit more complicated, but we have to stop believing that the louder we are the better chance we’ll have to get people’s attention.