Brilliant #Email from @Facebook

I've been taking a Facebook vacation this week... I only go on Facebook to interact with people who have sent me Facebook Messenger messages and to post for one of the companies I work with. (Sorry, not the video game company.)  Otherwise, I ignore the little red notification circle. Last night it said 49. Oddly, the app on my phone says 30.  I figure next Sunday I'll make a brief appearance, get caught up and then consider another vacation. It's been nice and quiet without Facebook.

Facebook has noticed my overall absence as it just sent me an email trying to get me to show my face. While I'm not going to click on it, I do want to spend a little time writing about how brilliant it is. The email marketer in me geeked out a little bit when I discovered what they're doing.

So check-it... subject mentions a friend by name and then shows a little bit of what looks like something they would have said.  (I had seen the full subject earlier on my desktop and it said "[Friend] and others have updated their statuses.)

So, naturally, I'm curious... what would we have been proud that my friend did?  So I opened the email.  But the actual status is nowhere to be found. I'm using Inbox by Gmail which is notorious at rendering emails wrong, so I wasn't sure... was it a mistake that I couldn't find the status update, or was it a ploy to get me to click through.

So I looked at the source - sure enough - hidden, white-on-white 1 pixel text in a 1 pixel tall table cell with css styling to hide. They were definitely not wanting you to see this in the email.  Brilliant!!!