How Long Should My Emails Be

Tips to Increase Email Engagement Quickly

Discover the ideal email length for marketing, sales, and onboarding to boost engagement and click-through rates. Learn how concise, clear messaging tailored to your audience drives higher responses and customer activation in your email campaigns.

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Crafting Concise Sales Emails That Drive Responses

In crafting emails for marketing campaigns, sales outreach, or customer onboarding, email length emerges as a crucial factor driving engagement and click-through rates (CTR).

The ideal length varies by purpose and audience, yet multiple studies converge on similar recommendations that help optimize email impact for each scenario.

Optimal Email Length Across Contexts

Research indicates that emails between 50 and 125 words tend to generate the highest response and click-through rates, with quick, concise messages outperforming longer ones in attention retention.

According to Boomerang's analysis of 40 million emails, this range achieves a click-through rate just over 50%. Another study from Constant Contact aligns closely, identifying about 200 words (approximately 20 lines of text) as a sweet spot for CTR. However, the ideal length hinges on the email's intent, marketing, sales, or onboarding, which influences how much detail needs to be conveyed.

Marketing Emails: Short & Impactful

Marketing emails often target broad audiences with promotional content or newsletters. Data suggests that brief emails between 50 and 125 words work best for promotional blasts or quick updates, as they are easy to digest and highly clickable, especially on mobile devices where screen space is limited.

WordStream's analysis confirms that marketing emails under 125 words yield click-through rates around 51%.

For newsletters or product announcements, slightly longer emails, around 150 to 200 words, allow room for a clear value proposition and a compelling call-to-action (CTA) without risking reader fatigue.

Campaign Monitor's guidelines recommend this mid-length for balancing narrative and brevity effectively, ensuring recipients stay engaged without feeling overwhelmed.

In longer marketing emails exceeding 250 words, engagement often drops unless the audience is highly segmented and invested, warranting more detailed storytelling or case studies. When longer content is necessary, structuring with subheads, bullet points, and inline links helps maintain readability and encourages clicking on relevant sections.

Sales Emails: Concise & Clear

Sales emails benefit immensely from brevity. The data is clear: sales outreach emails perform best when kept between 50 and 125 words, achieving over 50% response rates.

HubSpot's insights echo this, emphasizing that short, direct emails resonate more effectively with busy prospects. Extremely short emails (less than 10 words) have notably reduced response rates (about 36%), indicating that too much brevity can hurt engagement.

Additionally, writing sales emails at a simple reading level, around a third-grade level, significantly improves open and response rates, as they're easier and faster to understand. Informal, conversational tones combined with concise content encourage trust and reader action. Sales emails often include one or two key points and a clear, single CTA to avoid overwhelming the recipient.

Customer Onboarding Emails: Balanced & Guiding

Customer onboarding emails have a distinct role of educating and guiding new users, which often requires more content than marketing or sales emails, but must avoid losing engagement. Best practices for onboarding email length focus on clear, concise steps that provide value without overwhelming the reader.

While specific word counts vary by complexity, onboarding emails typically range from 100 to 200 words to sufficiently deliver key messages, tutorials, or next actions while keeping the recipient's attention.

Techniques like breaking content into digestible chunks, using bullet lists, and clear headings enhance usability. The goal is to encourage customer activation and retention with enough detail to inform but not fatigue.

Additional Factors To Consider

• Audience and Context: Understanding your recipients' preferences and reading habits is vital. Busy, mobile users benefit from shorter emails, while technical or highly engaged audiences may appreciate longer, detailed messages
• Device Usage: Nearly half of emails are opened on mobile devices, favoring concise emails for better readability. Desktop users, in contrast, tolerate longer emails more readily
• Timing and Purpose: Time-sensitive offers or newsletters require different lengths than relationship-building emails. Monday mornings, when inboxes are crowded, favor short emails to stand out
• Calls-to-Action (CTA) Placement: Emails with 1-3 images and CTAs placed near the top generally see higher click-through rates, underscoring the need for prominent, concise messaging above the fold

Best Practices For High Engagement Emails

1. Keep emails concise but informative: Aim for 50 to 125 words for sales and short marketing emails; extend to 150-200 words for newsletters and onboarding where more explanation is needed
2. Structure content for scannability: Use bullet points, subheadings, and short paragraphs to facilitate quick reading and comprehension
3. Use a clear, single call-to-action: Avoid multiple CTAs that confuse recipients; focus their attention on one desired step
4. Write at a simple reading level: Aim for clear, direct language that is easy to digest on any device
5. Test and iterate: Run A/B tests on email length within your specific audience to find the optimal balance for your brand and goals

Email length is a decisive factor influencing how recipients engage with marketing, sales, and onboarding emails. While around 100 words emerges as a robust rule of thumb to maximize both responses and click-throughs, adapting length according to content, audience, and context is essential.

Conciseness coupled with clarity, strategic CTA placement, and reader-friendly formatting will drive the highest engagement and conversion rates in your email campaigns.

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