Ideal length of your text-emailers to your audience?
Lately marketers have turned to the use of text emails to engage with their audience better. There are both sides to this story.
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First of all, there are two kinds of people. Those who swear by the power of email marketing, and those who think it’s a pointless and obsolete channel that may be taking its last breaths.
I belong to the first category, but I’ve met my fair share of marketers/entrepreneurs from the second segment as well.
If I may make a bold move to declare a verdict, it will be this — Email marketing is a channel that would outlive us all. And for good reason.
- It is immensely cheap
- It does bring in immediate results. While the number of conversions may be low, the ROI is one of the highest. The result? Marketers love it.
The one unfortunate truth there is the low conversation rates associated with this channel. Be it in the open rate or the click thru rates, the numbers are typically dismal. But I strongly suspect that is caused by non-optimal messaging more than anything else.
To counter this problem, there are a lot of things that marketers are doing these days. One of them is the use of text emails instead of rich media ones.
There are a lot of arguments that are given in favor of using text based emails, the biggest of them being the informal/casual/friendly tone it imparts to your emails. I remember Quincy Larson mentioning it in one of his stories.
{will update with screenshot from his story later today}
Makes sense. We have used them ourselves. The campaigns you see above were text based emails. But, it is a slippery slope if you don’t use it wisely and effectively.
What worked for us and what didn’t — will write about it some day.
We do use rich media emails as well. Different scenarios, different email type.
Lately, I have been receiving a ton of text based marketing mails. Unfortunately, a lot of them fail to keep me interested. Why? They are sooooo frigging long. And once they get long, they just lost that friendly overture that you wanted them to have.
TREAT EMAILS LIKE NEWSPAPER AD COPIES
Keep your emails short, simple, to the point and crispy.
- You don’t need to write complete sentences.
- You don’t need to be anal about the grammar and every single punctuation mark.
- The only thing you need to worry about is your email evoking an action
- And you do that by making your point through, without donning on the hat of Uncle Bill at Thanksgiving dinner.
FOCUS ON EVOKING ‘AN’ ACTION
Not ‘the action’.
Almost every single one of us wants our audience/consumers to do one simple thing — BUY. Your emails are not necessarily the ultimate stage of doing that. Treat emails as something that feeds your conversion funnel. You want as many of the recipients to follow through, with as less leak as possible.
So write the copy with that intent. Get your point across. If it is getting too long, don’t focus on painting the whole picture. Just focus on getting them inside the gallery. A landing page. A blog post. Your Facebook page post. A YouTube video. Use this secondary step to explain things more and then give them the ultimate CTA.
Remember, emails are relatively wider in their reach. As a result, the chances of leaks is also the highest. Focus on having a messaging that appeals to a wider macro base. Weed out those who aren’t interested and retain those who may ultimately convert. When you make your emails long, you lose me as a customer even though I may very well have bought your services. Not because you lost me, but because you lost my interest.
