Finally someone saying it. The amount of time i see people rewriting the opening line like it's the bloody Zapruder film while sending from domains that couldn't deliver a pizza, let alone an email... it's painful.
But I'd go further - the obsession with "perfect" copy is often a convenient distraction from admitting your offer sucks or your targeting is garbage. I've run split tests where the "ugly" email - plain text, no formatting, first sentence barely coherent - crushed the polished one, not because of copy, but because the list was hot and the inboxes weren't fried.
People underestimate how much deliverability and offer-market fit determine the outcome. you can write the most persuasive email in the world, but if the audience doesn't care about the problem, you're just screaming into a void with a better font.
In my experience, the hierarchy is: infrastructure > audience > offer > copy. most people have it backwards.
