What’s the ideal length for your email newsletter? How to make it shorter, easier for you to write, and easier for your readers to read?

In the course of doing this, I regularly hear the following statements about the length of email newsletters

1. We don’t want to email people too often so we save everything up for one long quarterly newsletter.

2. We add lots of information in our emails because we want them to be useful for our readers.

3. We have a blog but… we don’t really use it / that’s someone else’s job / we have to ask our web developers to upload them.

4. Our CEO really enjoys writing (that’s usually a toughie) and wants people to know:

   • we’re 10 (they probably don’t care)

   • we signed up x client (as above)

   • about every single webinar we have planned for the rest of the year so they can save the dates (there’s no way they care that far ahead unless you’re e.g. Ed Sheeran or Michael McIntyre)

5. We just have lots to tell people about.

All of these statements equal the same thing. Emails that…

1. take you a long time to create and become very onerous when you have other things to do. That means they’re less likely to even get written and sent out

2. almost certainly won’t be read in any depth

3. might be too big to even get delivered

4. without any clear CTA for a recipient to act on

5. can’t be easily measured in terms of impact

6. get put in the “I’ll read that later” folder, but later never comes.

Answer this truthfully:

You may not be your target audience, but do you actually read the email newsletters you send out in full? Do you find them an easy read and interesting all the way to the bottom? Honestly?

How long does it take to read x many words?

According to Monsieur Google (I just realised I think of Google as being male. Why?), it takes an average of 1 minute to silent read 250 words.

How many words are in your emails? Have you ever counted? This is a handy website https://wordstotime.com/ to check but in short:

• 250 words = 1 minute

• 500 words = 2 minutes

• 1,000 words = 4 minutes

• 1,500 words = 6 minutes

• 2,000 words = 8 minutes

I would argue that those reading times are on a larger PC-sized screen too and it probably takes longer on a mobile device where you have to constantly scroll and are more likely to have distractions around you too.

When 1 = 3 = 19

I’m presuming you create email newsletters on your desktop, right?

As a rule of thumb, a 500 word email (about 1 page of A4) is:

• a 2 minute read without distractions

• 61 lines long (not counting white space or images) when I write it in Mailchimp

• 181 lines when I look at it on a mobile, so that’s three times as long

• 19 thumb scrolls to read the whole thing.

Multiply those numbers by the length of your longer emails. Ouch.

Opened does not mean read

Just because someone is reported as having opened your email, it does not mean they read even a single word, let alone did the main CTA. In fact they might have just opened it to scroll to the bottom and unsubscribe.

Clicks on the other hand, give you more useful information. If someone has clicked on a link, you know they have probably at least got to that part in the email and been interested enough to take an action.

Mailchimp has a very helpful click map in campaign reports, where you can see the email, and the % and number of people who actually clicked on each link throughout it. You can do some more digging to find out WHO clicked on what too.

Now, those stats aren’t perfect, firewall bots can click on your links (it’s normally fairly easy to tell if they are from the click map), but they are still more useful than simple “opens”.

Then of course, there are other benefits like this:

An email is, generally, “one and done”. All that content you spent ages putting together is for a single send, and probably won’t ever see the light of day again.

On the other hand, putting longer content on your blog instead of within emails and linking to it means:

• Shorter emails as the detail is elsewhere just for those who want it.

• More website traffic from your email. And while they’re on your site, they might see something else of interest.

• Content becomes evergreen and gives search engines more to find with the keywords it contains - that content could still be serving you in 10 years’ time instead of just once in the email.

• It shows the likes of Google that your website is alive and kicking.

• All that helps your SEO rankings too.

Win win? I’d say so.

So, have I convinced you to write shorter email newsletters yet? If so, here are 7 ways to help you do it:

1. Rather than saving up all your news for one monster quarterly email, consider sending shorter ones more frequently

2. Instead of putting all the content within the content of the email, use your website and blog. That means you can have a much shorter “teaser” intro in the email with a button that links to more details - that might be a blog, or your events calendar for example.

3. Prioritise your CTAs - always think “if the reader only does one thing when they open this email, what do I want it to be?” Then put that first and make it bloody obvious.

4. Strip out every unnecessary word - put it through ChatGPT to make it more concise if you find it tricky.

5. Make your content as skimmable as possible - clear sub headings, bullets, line breaks, dividers, white space. This means a reader can skim the headings to see if they’re interested, then select content that is.

6. If you really do need a longer email, use a contents section at the start - with clear numbering. You might have something really useful in #5, but chances are a person is not going to read that far without knowing it’s worth the effort. Clear numbering allows easy navigation too.

7. Segment and/or use dynamic content*. Don’t send all your recipients all the content if you know it’s not relevant to them.

*dynamic content is available in Mailchimp’s new builder and allows you to change the visibility of every block in your email so that it only shows to people with specific criteria.

Got questions? Need help?

Get in touch - I’m Claire Witz, Chief Chimpologist and fully certified top 10 global Mailchimp Expert Pro Partner with over 15 years’ experience. I help organisations with all aspects of email marketing, including strategy and all the technical aspects.