What Is The Perfect Email Length?
As people receive more and more emails everyday, the length of your sales and marketing emails has become an increasingly important factor affecting the success of your email marketing campaigns. Trying to stand out in your audience’s inbox, is harder than ever before and many brand are struggling to stand out in these crowded inboxes. However, writing short, sweet and snappy copy that entices the the reader from the first line is a great place to start.
In this article we discuss how long your marketing emails should be using recent email data from expert marketers:
Why Is Email Length So Important?
But before we delve into the data we need to understand why the length and structure of your emails are so important:
- There are more factors than ever before all competing for your readers attention. On average people receive 40 business emails a day so it’s unlikely that they have the time to fully read every one.
- As readers now receive so many emails per day, they will often scan emails rather than reading them fully, meaning the shorter your email the more likely it is to get read in full.
- Email clients often “clip” and shorten email previews so that it fits on various sized screens. Thus, readers can often miss valuable information when scanning their inbox.
So What is The Ideal Email Length?
So we have discussed why the email length is important, now let’s cover some best practices. There are 4 different areas of the email that need to be focused on regarding length and they are:
- Subject Line
- Preheader Text
- Email Copy
- Call To Action (CTA)
Subject Line
As previously mentioned the Inbox is a crowded place so nailing your subject line is crucial if you want to stand out from the crowd. Inboxx recommends analysing your email data to see how many of your email subscribers are using mobile.
Be sure to incorporate some personalisation into your subject lines in order to engage them and establish the point of your email, factors such as name, age, gender, location etc can all be used to effectively personalise email subject lines. Always test out your subject lines on different devices to see how they will appear to different users. For our full guide on how to write the perfect subject line click here:
Subject Line Ideal Length: Between 30-50 characters with 40 being the sweet spot
Preheader Text
The preheader text is the bit of copy that appears next to the subject line, giving a preview of what the email is going to be about. Think of the pre header as a kind of “second chance” to grab your reader’s attention if the subject line fails.
Again always remember that over half of your email list will be using a mobile device to check their emails, so to increase your open rates ensure that the preheader text is optimised for mobile devices.
Preheader Text Ideal Length: 40-100 Characters
Email Copy
Email copywriting is an entire skill in itself. Remember when crafting your email copy, keep in mind people’s attention spans. People tend to skip long introductions and scan the main parts of the text. Keep your copy clean and well laid out so that even when scanned through quickly people can still get all the information they need. Good email copy emphasises and reiterates the important points to really hammer home the message. Click here for our full guide on how to provide value with your email copy:
Be sure to avoid basic grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in your copy as this will come across as hugely unprofessional and illegitimate potentially ruining your conversion rate and click through rate.
Email Copy Ideal Length: 50-125 words
Call To Action (CTA)
An email without a CTA serves no purpose. Once your readers have opened your email, scanned most of the copy, the end of the email needs to contain an engaging call to action (CTA). A well written call to action drives clicks through to your website increasing your conversion rate drastically.
You want your CTA to be specific and action oriented, making use of appropriate action words and enticing the reader to click through and find out more. Click here to read our full guide on how to write the perfect call to action:
Call To Action Ideal Length: 2-4 words
Wrap up
The ideal email length can differ depending on the content you are sending, for example if your brand or one of the services you are providing is changing drastically then a longer email is necessary to update your email list in full. Don’t be too rigid with your email length. But, as a general rule, the shorter and sweeter your copy is, the more successful your email campaigns will be, no one wants to spend their days reading a novel in their inbox.
So to answer the question we posed at the start of this blog “What is the perfect email length?”
The answer is
“It depends 😉 “
If you’d rather leave your email marketing to the professionals then feel free to get in touch.
Inbox offers bespoke email marketing services for B2B businesses. Our email campaigns are designed to get you noticed by the people that matter.
