What was the bounce rate, avg visit time and conversion rate (email signup) between people who came from the non-designed vs. designed ad though?
A higher clickthrough rate isn't necessarily better if more of the people who came from the non-designed ad didn't do much or anything on the page and mostly clicked out of curiosity.
One of the most useful design-related tools I've found is this color picker which generates complimentary colors for you based on model of your choice (triadic, analogous, etc.):
I always struggled with picking complimentary colors and found this worked a lot better than most of the pre-defined color palette suggestions out there.
What made the biggest difference for me was using a text to speech reader to proofread and edit. You are able to catch a lot of phrasing that looks ok but sounds wrong or awkward this way.
Also, the message and approach should be very different depending on who you're reaching out to and for what reason (example: getting a job versus getting a client).
Providing value is important, but the goal of the first email is simply to get someone to reply, not overload them with info upfront (like what was suggested as one of the examples, a 13-page PowerPoint deck with data analysis).
I find providing 1-2 specific concrete ideas related to your product, service or ask and tailored for your prospect's business is enough to get an interested reply. Some good templates for this here: https://artofemails.com/new-clients
My only thought is, I wonder how well these ecommerce emails perform. The majority of them are very image heavy, which affects deliverability and conversions. Some of them have most or all of their text and buttons directly on the images themselves.
Of course, if you're offering a discount, the email may convert better than average, but since the majority of stores only send this type of ecommerce style emails throughout the year, I'm curious how they perform in general.
Search Engine Roundtable conducted a survey after the medic update, here are the
categories of websites that were affected: https://s3.amazonaws.com/images.seroundtable.com/google-medi... (Health accounted for the biggest percentage but there were many other verticals that were impacted as well.)
There has also been several core algorithm updates since then that have caused ranking drops and volatility across the board.
A higher clickthrough rate isn't necessarily better if more of the people who came from the non-designed ad didn't do much or anything on the page and mostly clicked out of curiosity.