I worked with Chris Hanney on Gameplainer (which, if you didn't know is a 10-in-1 platform for game community managers to consolidate their community sentiments, reviews, and trend-tracking in one!)
I'm a firm believer that simple is best. Why?
Use yourself as the social experiment! I started saving emails and that caught my eye and started asking myself why I opened the emails at all. What pushes me away from emails is when they're bedazzled with fancy branding that makes it an eyesore to read, or the information I want is at the bottom of a long email. I'm not scrolling for a mile. I have better things to do with my time.
The takeaway is: make what you're selling easy for your customer. If it's not, it will get deleted, reported as spam, or permanently live in the junk folder. The golden rule of email marketing: do not make them hunt to find the information they need. Give it to them at the beginning.
To give some background on Gameplainer and Chris. Gameplainer is currently in active development, and Chris was using his personal email as the default email for all business inquiries and outreach. So, that was the first thing we fixed. Your personal email should not be your business email! You don't want your invoice for your kid's childcare or football lessons getting mixed up with work stuff!
So we made chris@gameplainer.com. A @gameplainer.com email signals trustworthiness and professionalism to prospective collaborators. The goal is for community managers to want to work with Chris because Gameplainer makes their jobs easier.
Chris and I talked about the customer journey on Gameplainer. Chris already figured out who the target audience is (game community managers) and the problem (too many tabs open and a million things to track). Email marketing is part of the hook. Email marketing works when you've captured the alien radio wave signal and need to bring it to earth – or funnel it to the bottom-of-the-funnel, which is where the customer gives you money to solve the problem.
Below is the email marketing template (for free!) that we used. Remember, email marketing works best when it's simple. HubSpot and Odoo also use simple, plain email marketing with their company logo at the bottom. And guess what – it works! They're also great references to use. I highly recommend signing up for a free account just to study their email templates.