Writing a great email campaign can be really challenging. You’ve got an arsenal of awesome selling points to back up your amazing product, but if you include them all, your email’s three pages long.
It feels like a balancing act. What do you include to drive clicks and conversions – without making a wall of text that scares people away?
Don’t worry. We’ll examine how to get your marketing emails to the ideal length without sacrificing conversions.
What’s the Ideal Marketing Email Length for Cold Campaigns?
The ideal length for a cold marketing email can be summarized as: just enough content to convince contacts to click.
When you have a pile of excellent selling points, it can be really tough to cut some of them out. After all, the more persuasive the better, right? The problem is it’s very easy to create a massively long message when you’re trying to bring all your points across at once.
Pick Your Best Points and Save the Rest
Think of it like this: your contact has a finite attention span. With cold contacts, that attention span is very limited, so you have to make the most of it. Get in the mindset that your contacts are actively looking for reasons to ignore or delete your email (they aren’t, necessarily, but it’ll help you write punchy emails).
Look at your selling points. Which ones are the most impactful, and which ones fall under the “also valuable but not going to clinch the deal on their own” category?
Take your best points and craft your email around that, and keep it short and snappy. The other points should go on your landing page.
The Winning Formula
Here’s the secret: your email’s main goal isn’t the conversion. It’s the click. The email is part of the overall message that will convince people to convert, but it’s not the whole thing. Your email piques their interest enough that they’re considering converting, so they click. Let’s walk through it.
Your contact has a problem. Your product solves that problem (assuming your list is well-targeted). Is it worth spending some of your contact’s finite attention span explaining that problem? Probably not.
On the other hand, letting them know that you understand the problem is absolutely worthwhile, because it positions you perfectly to follow it up with your solution.
Open with a one-or-two-sentence paragraph highlighting the issue. Just enough to show that you’re aware of it.
Follow that with another one-or-two-sentence paragraph introducing your solution and explaining very briefly how it solves their problem.
Then you can back it up with a secondary benefit, or even a bullet list of benefits as long as they’re short and to the point. Make sure your language is always focused on solving the contact’s problem, not how awesome your product is!
Back it up with some social proof, such as a case study. Bonus points if that case study involves a company in the same industry as your contacts – that’s just an extra layer of persuasiveness on top.
At this point you’ve got maybe four or five sentences that are laser-focused on convincing the contact to click. That’s solid – now you need to give them something to click on.
This is where your call-to-action comes in. Your campaign should only have one main call to action – every single part of this email is designed solely to get them to click that button. Don’t dilute that with multiple different options.
Give them a nice, prominent CTA button, and don’t use something generic and boring like “Click Here”. That doesn’t tell them anything on its own, and you can bet that the first thing they notice when they open it is the CTA, so make it do some work for you there too.
“Click Here” tells them you want them to click it, but not why. For example, if your offering is PPC ad help, “Step Up Your PPC Game” is a lot more engaging and informative. It’s still obviously a button for them to click, but now it helps underscore your message as well.
All in all, here’s what a good starting point looks for email length:
- One or two introductory sentences (i.e. what the problem is)
- One or two product-value-oriented sentences (i.e. the benefits of using your offer to solve that problem)
- One or two supporting sentences (i.e. social proof, case studies, something to reinforce your message)
- A strong call to action
Total length: six sentences and a button.
Lean on Your Landing Page a Little
A good landing page does a lot of work for you. A strong email campaign drives people to your landing page and has them at least halfway to conversion-readiness.
Your landing page should have two goals:
- Give them an easy way to convert
- Give them any additional information they might need to convince them to convert
Those points you didn’t use in your campaigns should inform your landing page content. Make sure your form is above the fold and your headline and hero-section content reinforces the message in your email campaign, and use the rest of your selling points to nudge reluctant contacts over the edge.
