Best of the inbox: plain-text vs designed, and the click gap

Best of the inbox: plain-text vs designed, and the click gap
A tidy experiment on a question that splits every email team.

🧪 Tests
— Stripped-down beat the template on clicks by 19% — Same offer, same list segment, ~80k each. The image-heavy HTML won 'looks', the plain-ish version (one link, system font, no header image) won clicks and landed in Primary more often. Worth your time: they show the Gmail tab distribution side by side.
— But the designed version won on a cold segment — Nuance the author kept: for unengaged recipients, the branded template rebuilt a little trust. Format choice depends on segment temperature.

Made the cut because it resists a one-size answer and gives you the segment-level caveat.

Saved you ~2 hours and a pointless internal 'plain vs pretty' debate.