Don’t Mistake Emails for Miniskirts

You might be wondering how long you should make your emails.

The good news is that there’s a lot of advice about that out there.

The bad news is that there’s a lot of advice out there.

You have the opportunity to trawl through it all, try to figure it out and start A/B testing it. That’s what most marketers would do.

They’d read one marketer telling you to keep it short, because Twitter has eroded attention spans.

Another will tell you to make them long, to demonstrate your knowledge.

Yet another will make that joke about it being like a miniskirt – long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to be interesting.

Forget all of that.

Because you’re not a marketer, are you? You know marketing (and you’re learning more as you read these articles) and you use marketing, but that’s not your role in society.

You are a hypnotist, so let me talk to you like one.

Your emails should be long enough to put your readers into a trance. And not a word longer.

Given your background, no other answer holds any value.

After all, did Erickson care about “short attention spans” when spending hours hypnotising people? Good hypnosis can captivate people for as long as you need – yes, even phone addicts.

On the other hand, a quick induction takes seconds. Some problems are just as fast to resolve. Why spend longer than you need?

So play around with it. Put yourself in your clients’ shoes and wonder what it takes to send them spinning. If you can blow out issues with a sentence, then don’t write a novel.

In the meantime, here’s a suggested length. Start with this and see how it works for you. Don’t be constrained by this, but don’t break these rules without learning from the results.

This sentence is around 300 words from the start of this post. It’s hard to draw people in and get them hungry for your offer in less than that. You can do it, absolutely, but start with substance before dialling it back.

But if you reach 800 words and you’re still getting into the swing of your story, then rethink your approach. That’s more words than many people are willing to read every day. If your email delivers the goods in 30 seconds, they’ll never hesitate to open and read. If it takes a few minutes, then it starts becoming a Task that needs Doing.

Like I say, play with it.

If you use pictures (which you don’t need, but you might like to experiment with) then you might need fewer words.

If your clients are academics, then 800 words might be far too slender.

See what you need to put them into an open state of mind, and use that.

It’s simple when you know your clients.

Except when it’s not, of course.

You can probably figure this out on your own. That said, sometimes you need the big guns to really make sure your emails win.

There are many email copywriters out there. One thing you can say about me is that I’m one of them.

So save yourself some time and hassle. See how we can work together and make something beautiful:

https://battenandking.com/

Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash