Almost Half Your Email Clicks Come From One Spot
By Armando J. Perez-Carreno / Featuring R.J. Talyor
I talked with R.J. Talyor, founder of Backstroke, about why the hero image drives 46% of email clicks, what real personalization looks like, and when to skip the AI tool and hire a contractor.
About 46% of the clicks in a marketing email come from the hero image, the first 400 to 600 pixels at the top. That's the space most brands fill with a big logo, and it's where a reader decides whether to keep going. R.J. Talyor, founder of Backstroke, has spent 24 years in email, and his company uses AI to build a different version of that space, and the rest of the email, for every subscriber.
In this episode, I talked with R.J. Talyor, the founder of Backstroke. R.J. got his start at ExactTarget, which Salesforce bought, and he led the email and mobile teams at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. He later sold his previous company, Pattern89, to Shutterstock. Backstroke works with e-commerce brands, predicting what each person on a list is likely to open, click, and buy, and then generating the version of the email that fits them.
When most people hear "personalized email," they think of merge tags. You add the person's first name, maybe their company, and call it done. R.J. described how far past that you can go. He gets emails from a clothing brand advertising women's dresses, when he only buys men's clothes from them. His wife, on the other hand, might want to see both, since she often shops for him too. Then there's everything else a brand already knows: your size, what's in stock, whether you only buy on discount, whether you'd rather see a shirt on someone hiking than sitting at a desk. R.J. says brands see revenue gains of 15% to 40% from highly personalized emails, and close to 100% in some cases.
What I liked is that he didn't stop at the upside. He talked about a trap he sees with AI, and one he catches himself in. Once the machine saves you time, it's tempting to fill that time with more optimizing. His view is that the time saved should go to slower, more human work. If Backstroke gives you back the two and a half hours you spent building Thursday's email, use them to write handwritten thank-you notes or sit in on a few customer support calls. He practices this himself. He's visited about 95% of Backstroke's customers in person, often bringing lunch and training them shoulder to shoulder. One customer told him she didn't like a feature because it automated four hours of work she enjoyed. He said he'd never have heard that on a 30-minute Zoom.
We also got into the tension inside growing companies. The creative director wants the brand protected. The person who owns the revenue number wants results by the end of the month. R.J. asks customers which matters more, and they usually say both. Someone has to make the call, and he sees it as a culture question. If the CEO wants to approve every subject line and image crop, the business can't scale, whether the work is done by people or by AI.
Here's an idea I think any small business can use right away. Brands that only send promotions train you to ignore them until you're ready to buy, and then you might go to Amazon instead. The brands R.J. keeps opening send content about the things he cares about, like fishing and hiking, with the products in the background. I gave the example of 3D printing. An email that explains when to use one filament instead of another keeps me opening, and it puts that brand in front of me when I need to buy.
The part I appreciated most was his honesty about fit. I asked about a business with 15,000 subscribers that rarely emails them. His answer was to skip Backstroke for now and hire a contractor for three months to get an email program running and prove it can drive revenue. Backstroke makes sense once email is around 20% to 30% of your revenue and you're sending a few campaigns a week.
His advice for everyone else was simple and cheap. If you have a Claude subscription, connect it to your email platform and ask it the questions you'd ask a consultant: what's working, what isn't, and what three to five changes would improve your program. I agree completely. Most of these tools can connect through an API or MCP, so Claude reads your real data instead of guessing, and it'll often catch things like missing UTM tracking.
The takeaway for me is to start with the basics and look at the top of your next email. If the first thing people see is your logo, try putting something there that your reader wants to click on. You can find R.J. and his team at backstroke.com.