When you go to dinner with your in-laws, do you dress the way you would to wash the car on a hungover Sunday morning?

When you send a “Happy New Year” WhatsApp to your aunt, do you include a photo of your personal body parts?

When you get an email from the hospital about your appointment, is it an animating HTML showcase with various fonts, colours and a funky auto-signature?

I’m sure some people might answer the first question with a “sometimes” but I’m hoping “never” is the universal answer to question two.

I also feel very confident that question three comes with a solid “no” across the board.

The point of this jovial Q&A is to drive home the fact that genuine communications tend to be quite simple. If I receive an email that looks like it’s been written just for me, comes in a standard font, and is in and out of my brain in two or three paragraphs, I approach it as genuine and worth looking at.

The moment I open an email to see some ‘impressive’ HTML monstrosity, I know I’m being sold to or on a newsletter mail group (or its my aunt using her Etsy account to get back at me for that WhatsApp message).

Don’t be tempted to ‘impress’ cold prospects with how great you are at HTML. Give your email a chance to succeed by writing it well and having something worthwhile to say (plenty of our other blogs have advice on this).

If you REALLY want to make some progress with your emails, you’ll just have to talk to us (or write to us… just not in HTML. Please).