Hey, it's your fav email guy.

Someone asked me about this the other day and I was reminded how widespread it still is. So let's kill it.

The myth: you need HTML text sections woven through your emails. If you're not sure what I mean, those are the native Klaviyo text and blocks, copy that's built right inside the email platform instead of designed as an image. The belief is that an email made entirely of image files is somehow wrong.

It isn't.

Why people believe it

The usual claim is that image-only emails hurt your deliverability because they "look spammy" to inbox providers. Most people repeating this have never actually tested it. I have, and done right, there's no difference.

That said, the claim isn't pure nonsense. If your email is nothing but a few massive image files and zero text, you can land in spam more often. So there's a kernel of truth here, just not the conclusion people draw from it. We'll get to the fix in a second.

Why building emails in HTML actually hurts you

Here's the part nobody mentions. Native HTML sections cause more problems than they solve, because inbox providers mess with them constantly.

Dark mode is the big one. Some people read in light mode, some in dark, and your HTML text gets re-rendered based on their setting. I see it all the time: dark blue text sitting on a background that dark mode flips to black, and suddenly the message is invisible.

Text sizing is the other one. Plenty of people, especially older readers, run their phones with enlarged text. That setting blows up the proportions and spacing of your HTML sections and wrecks the layout you carefully built.

You can try to engineer around all of this, but it adds a lot of complexity to your process, and more complexity just means more ways for something to break.

The fix

Since the spam concern is partly real, you do want some real text in the email. The trick is that it doesn't need to be in the body. Just put it in the footer.

Use native text for your company address, a few lines about the brand, and your unsubscribe section. For most emails, that alone is enough HTML to keep you out of spammy territory.

There's an optional add-on some people use: a block of "invisible text" in the footer, tiny text set to the same color as the background, with a few hundred words of site copy pasted in. It's invisible to the reader but reads as real HTML content to an inbox provider. One honest caveat, since you won't hear this part elsewhere: hidden text is itself a known spam signal for some filters, so it can cut both ways. Test it on your own account before rolling it out, rather than assuming it's a free win.

For everything else, the body of the email, design it in Figma and upload it as images. That's it. No weaving required.

Have a good one,

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