Email Marketing Blog

“Back in the day”, the only really long emails I received from business owners were ezines. In comparison with newsletters, autoresponder messages were relatively short and generally conained one thought per message.

Since emailing entire sales letters seems to be the norm these days, the question often arises as to how long is too long? Does size really matter?

An old rule of thumb, which can be applied here, is to take as much time as - but not more than - you need to make your point. If you tend to run at the mouth like I do (!), it’s important to become cognizant of that fact.

While you can get away with long sales letters on a sales page, don’t assume this effectiveness translates over to your readers’ inboxes. Here’s why:

• Preview Panes. I, for one, read most of my email in a preview pane. That means I am seeing a very small portion of the message and, therefore, need to endlessly scroll to get through it.
• Text-based Emails. The majority of emails I receive are text-based. While the text on a web-based sales letter is broken up by tables, color, font changes, etc., that’s not the case with text-based. A long sales letter is PAINFUL to wade through, IMHO!
• When I reach a web page, I normally scan the headline, subheads and bullets, then decide if I want ot read all or most of the sales page. That’s not as easy to do in an email.

It’s more effective to write shorter, succinct messages for your autoresponder campaign, than to have a few that are so long that few people will read them. Try to keep your information “above the fold” or, at most, the length of one printed page.

If you can’t say it all in 1-3 short paragraphs, be sure to break up the look of your message with bullets and one-line paragraphs.

Like this.

That keeps the reader flowing through your work quicker than when met with a sea of black print.

Let me also suggest that you craft your messages and then let them sit for an hour or a day. Revisit them with the mindset of a magazine editor who is charged with cutting the fat from your article. I think you’ll be surprised as to how much you can trim without compromising your message.

In fact, my next post will be a rewrite of this article intended for an email message!

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse

Tags

email marketing, autoresponders

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 10:48 am and is filed under email marketing, autoresponders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.