Home 9 Email Writing 9 Three Ways to Keep Your Marketing E-mails Short

Three Ways to Keep Your Marketing E-mails Short

by | Feb 18, 2015 | Email Writing | 0 comments

pfb0_bigstockphotoEmail5859574

Let’s start this one with a hypothetical. Imagine it’s a Tuesday morning, around 11:45. You’re in your office, just preparing to head to the car to go meet a client for lunch. As you walk out the door you flip to your phone to check your e-mail. You have a couple of new messages, and both of them are for e-mail lists you’ve signed up for. We’ll call them the e-mail lists for Company A and Company B.

Company A has sent you an exhaustive missive that details everything about their new line of products—eight products in total, with a full paragraph of information on each one of them. The full e-mail is more than 700 words!

Company B has sent you a quick reminder to call them if you have any needs they can meet. Their e-mail is exactly three sentences long, including a call to action. It totals 35 words.

Our questions for you are two. The first question: How likely are you, really, to read the e-mail from Company A? One glance at that litany of text and you’re probably going to swipe it into your trashcan. It’s not that you’re uninterested per se—but really, who has the time?

Our second question: Don’t you think it’s pretty likely that you will read the e-mail from Company B, at least if the headline is compelling enough for you to open it in the first place? Reading 35 words takes only slightly more time than it does to delete the message; why not give it a cursory scan?

And that’s the point here: E-mail marketing tends to be the most significant and successful form of content marketing, yet it’s the e-mails that are short and sweet that get the best results. And that brings us to the topic du jour: How do you ensure that your marketing e-mails are as brief, as lean, and as focused as possible?

We have three quick tips for you:

  1. Treat your e-mail like a landing page. A landing page is a piece of Web content that’s designed to do one thing and one thing only—to convert customers and get them to take a specific action, whether it’s to sign up for an e-mail list, buy a specific product, or download an e-Book. A landing page is focused on just one topic and getting the reader to take just one action, and as such a landing page is always going to be extremely direct and uncluttered. Use the landing page mentality as a guide for your marketing e-mails.
  2. Let images do the talking. A picture’s worth… well, you know. Images can make great marketing e-mail fodder; a quick piece of graphic text can be more attention-grabbing than a full written paragraph, and using an image forces you to keep things brief.
  3. Here’s an e-mail marketing strategy that tends to work well: Provide the first three or four sentences of a really great new company blog post, as a kind of a teaser, and then redirect readers to the blog itself for more information—“Click here to read the rest.” Not only does this drive traffic to your blog, but it also helps ensure your e-mail message is short and snappy.

E-mail marketing works—especially when it gets to the point. For assistance with any of this, contact the Grammar Chic, Inc. team at your convenience! Call 803-831-7444, or visit www.grammarchic.net.