How Long Should Your Email Copy Be?

How Long Should Your Email Copy Be?

In this post I’m going to answer a big email marketing question.

And that’s how long should your email copy be?

Well, I think most email marketers get this wrong. I think they write too much copy and make their emails far too long.

The issue with really long email copy is that it’s really off-putting.

If you open an email from someone, particularly if it’s not from someone you know, and they’ve written a whole essay, you’re probably not going to be bothered to read it. You’re just going to delete it and move on to the next email.

Instead of doing that, I would recommend that you think about how a friend would email something to you.

If a friend wanted you to see something show you something, whether it’s a product or a service or a video or something like that, how long would their email be?

It’s going to be pretty short and it’s going to be to the point.

Content Emails

And because of that, if you’re emailing your list content, I think that you should keep your emails really really short.

Something like four to eight sentences long. No longer than that.

All you really want to do with content emails is explain what the content is, what’s included in it, and why the people on your email list will actually want to take the time to consume it.

Direct Selling Emails

If you’re sending an email where you’re directly selling your products or services, your email copy is going to need to be a little bit longer.

But you still want to keep it short.

If what you’re offering is relatively inexpensive, and a bit of an impulse purchase, then I think eight to twelve sentences is about right.

That’s a bit longer than the our content emails, because you do need to provide a bit more information when you’re asking people to pay for something.

And of course, if you’re looking to sell higher value products and services, then your email copy is going to need to be a bit longer than that.

The more money you ask for, the longer your email copy needs to be. Because you need to provide more benefits and more reasons why your subscribers should buy the thing you’re offering.

No Fluff!

Whenever you’re writing email copy, make sure there’s no fluff or wasted sentences.

That’s just going to decrease your open rate and click-through rates.

If you’re on my email list, then you’ll know that 90-95% of the emails I send out are about my own content.

So over the last six months or so, I’ve experimented with really short email copy.

Four/five sentences long – just long enough to explain what the content’s about, and provide a link to it. And that has worked really really well.

I have a relatively large email list, and I’ve seen the click-through rates from my emails double with this strategy alone.

Save Yourself Time

Keeping email copy nice and short also has the added benefit of saving you time, because it’s a lot quicker to write.

Everyone’s busy and we all have lots of other things to get on with, if you can write your emails in half the time, and it be more effective, that’s a win all around.

5-Part Facebook Ad Template

Before you go, there’s something I want to quickly mention that I think you’d be very interested in if you’re running ads on Facebook.

And that’s my 5-Part Facebook Ad Template which you can download right now for free.

This ad template includes some of the best performing ads I’ve created for my clients in a number of different industries.

I’ve broken each ad down into their five elements and explained what I’ve included in each one and why.

So if you’re looking to advertise on Facebook, you can model from these and you should find it really, really useful.

As I said, you could download this for free here: https://heathmedia.co.uk/facebook-ad-template-lp/

Talk soon,

Ben