How Long Should a Marketing Email Be?

Email readers are mostly scanners. Some of your subscribers won’t read every single word in your marketing emails. Instead, they’ll skip to parts they’re interested in or disregard the message completely if nothing catches their attention.

You can adapt your digital marketing strategy to work with low attention spans. Apart from employing design and layout techniques to make your marketing emails more scannable, you can write shorter but more impactful messages, and we can show you how to get there!

Why the Length of Email Marketing Campaigns Matters
How to Choose the Ideal Email Length
What Is the Average Email Length?
- Why Go with Shorter Email Copy Length?
- Why Go with Longer Marketing Email Copy?
Industries that Often Have Shorter Emails
Industries that Tend to Send a Long Email
What's Next in Marketing Emails?

Why the Length of Email Marketing Campaigns Matters

Here's what matters as much as email marketing: Websites. This is why your email copy length matters. The min email marketing messages you send should have the basics to direct someone to your business page, which can be done with a clear subject that hooks and email subject lines that are equally inviting enough to have a reader open the email in the first place.

The ideal email length can be directly related to your sales. Too long of a read? You lose a sale. Too short? Sales will plummet because no one is interested or understands what they're buying.

It's important to get a great free online marketing tool (even if it only has a free trial) to see how small your copy can actually be. We'll go over some A/B testing basics as well. But your business can also rely on services that offer the right length of text in email templates.

TruVISIBILITY has done the research to create ideal high-converting templates for nearly every goal of a business. Need better response rate? Check. Introducing a new product? Check. Want people to click through your email message? There's a template for that!

How to Choose the Ideal Email Length

You might think 125 words isn’t enough to fully convey a marketing message. That could be the case sometimes, but the fact remains: brief copy performs better.

Email copy between 50 to 25 words typically results in response rates over 50%. Don’t make it too short, though. An email with 25 words may perform the same as messages with 500 to 2000 words, averaging a response rate of less than 45%.

If your email includes a list, you can use bullet points. This keeps the separate thoughts organized and prevents you from getting lost in attempting to go into too much detail.

Sending a newsletter? Of all email types, this one’s most likely to contain walls of text. If you believe your marketing email may require a longer copy, you can always use A/B testing to experiment with different email copy lengths.

Types of Emails and Their Lengths

The length of a marketing email depends on:

What you want to say
What action you want from your audience
How fast you want the information to come across

Let's take a look at how long some of these types of emails could be on average across all industries.

1) Newsletters

Your email newsletter length could end up be your longest. Why? Because you have a lot of content to share. But don’t overshare, your goal with a newsletter should be driving traffic to your website or landing page.

The key to a good newsletter length is to keep each section brief. Check out and example of our weekly newsletter below. Overall the email is long, but each section only has a few paragraphs each.

2) Promotional Email

We recommend keeping your promotional email’s short. Use images and a strong headline to help communicate your offer. Get to your offer quickly.

3) Welcome Email

Your welcome email could be short or long format, it really depends on how much information you want to share with your new subscribers.

Here are two examples that show both a shorter version and longer version, that both work.

Can You Say a Lot with Email Subject Lines?

Email marketing depends a lot on subject lines. But they don't need to be long! The length, as mentioned, of a subject line is around 28 characters and definitely not more than 55. Saying action words and phrases like "click for a free gift" or "download this helpful tool" immediately tell a potential customer what they're being offered.

You can also use a different marketing tactic by teasing what's inside the email. "Click for a HOT surprise", which is a good subject to tease a special new sauce offered at a restaurant, for example.

Or you can say a lot with few words, such as this example fro Scott's Flights: "Maine-$149-$198", which almost explicitly tells the audience in their subject lines that they can take advantage of a travel deal to Maine for the price advertised for a particular day or days.

Does Your Email Marketing Depend on Images, Videos, etc.?

Images of products and videos showing how to use a product or giving a short "infomercial" about a product's features can elevate an email message better than words more often than not.

But first things first: Make sure you have the right software that allows you to implement this type of content. A free trial will help you determine if you can have images in your emails or not. And it should never cost anything to test out or send a small number of emails.

A/B Testing

Our recommendation is to test. Your email length strategy should be based on data. So perform an A/B split test to see what length email performs best with your subscribers. You should also be able to see the rate at which people leave the opened email (bounce rate) or the open rate.

Note on Content and Subject Line Length

The CTA will be the main piece of content you should have in an online marketing email.

The CTA should be the easiest to digest out of all your email’s elements. Make it short and sweet.

As email length best practices go, this is a no-brainer. CTAs should be action oriented. They’re usually presented in larger, brighter and eye-catching fonts. It makes sense to let design speak more than the actual words.

Two to five words are enough to drive your point home while keeping your subscribers focused. Anything more than this range can look messy and confusing.

What about one-word CTAs? Examples like “submit” or “download” are common. While they’re actionable, these two are also examples of friction words, meaning they can push away potential customers.

At best, one-word variants may read as vague or emotionless to some. More often, though, they may convey the idea that your subscriber must agree to something they might not want to do.

If brevity is your goal, aim for at least two words. The Made In email below contains two great examples: “Let’s Cook!” and “Shop Now.”

What Is the Average Email Length?

On Average, about 430 words were found in most marketing email copy. Email marketing campaigns for a small business can be tricky to navigate with so many unknowns. Aside from A/B testing, businesses can look at their sales, their goals, and try to write email marketing copy up to 400-430 words to start.

Here are the four basic email length best practices you should take into action:

The ideal subject line length is between 28 to 50 characters.
The ideal preheader text length is between 40 to 100 characters.
The ideal email copy length is between 50 to 125 words.
The ideal CTA length is between two to five words.

For example, we can look to a study by Boomerang from 2016, which explored response rates to more than 40 million emails. The study broke down response rates for emails of different lengths, based on number of words:

10 words yielded a 36 percent response.
25 words yielded a 44 percent response.
50 words yielded a 50 percent response.
75 words yielded a 51 percent response.
100 words yielded a 51 percent response.
125 words yielded a 50 percent response.
150 words yielded a 49 percent response.
175 words yielded a 49 percent response.
200 words yielded a 48 percent response.

Why Go with Shorter Email Copy Length?

However, more than 50% of the emails we analyzed contained 300 words or less, which takes about 2.3 minutes to read. With people receiving more emails than ever before, it makes sense that experts are sending shorter emails.

Email marketers need to stand out to captivate their readers. Short emails might be a good strategy for doing so.

Marketers who may have more imagery and other things that help send their message, such as a kicker subject line, don't want to overwhelm their contacts. They understand that everyone's email inboxes are getting full and time is of the essence, which is why they feel confident in giving the people what they want - shorter email copy.

Why Go with Longer Marketing Email Copy?

It’s not that long-form emails are effective, necessarily. Rather, what’s effective? Your marketing email should have value for the people on your list. Most marketers don’t set out every other Sunday with a goal of writing the longest email possible. But they do have a goal of writing a valuable, fun letter to each and every subscriber on the list. If companies put my heart and soul into it, that’s why people respond.

Matt Kepnes, author and founder of travel blog Nomadic Matt, is one of the top marketers in the biz today. He sends long-form emails as well. On average, they contain 802 words. Instead of linking off to posts on his blog, he includes entire articles within his emails. These messages see high open and click-through rates.

Keep in mind that most email marketing read are those emails that are important enough or offer value to your contacts. So how long should your email marketing be? Depends on the content! Not many people want to read about 800 words of thank you notes and holiday greetings unless there is some value to the reader or new information or entertainment in it.

Industries that Often Have Shorter Emails

Your digital marketing should not rely solely on this guide below because this is a general measure of what's often found in the email marketing world today. Every business can send marketing messages that are fewer than 400 characters.

Ecommerce

This is a giant umbrella for businesses, but ecommerce businesses will likely debate about how long their email marketing should be. Emails of this kind have one goal: make sales.

Whether it's on specific products or not, there are many other ways they advertise items that are not through a ton of marketing words. Some of these include:

Images of products
CTA button hyperlinking to a webpage (with possible longer text)
Marketing videos in the body of the email that showcase products or how to use a product

Subject lines of these type of shorter emails already say a lot about what the email is selling or what it's about, ensuring there is no need for longer explanation or paragraphs of text.

Industries that Tend to Send a Long Email

Okay, hear us out, customers of the non-traditional kind expect longer emails from certain businesses or even non-profits. And that's okay! It all depends on what the message or goal is from the business.

Non-profits

Non-profits will often have newsletters and emails about upcoming events. This is not an ecommerce email, but it is worth mentioning because they still occasionally need "customers" or people to donate to their non-profit or to make another action, such as signing up for an event.

All of these action items will be using longer text to explain in detail what an event is or how someone's money is being put to good use.

Contractors

We are going to put real estate agents under this category because real estate agents can get away with shorter emails and speaking to a large audience with longer emails. It all depends on the message!

Contractors have many goals, so they can often be found sending longer emails that:

Keep their audience "in the know" of what's going on with their business
Explain everything that a new deal entails, such as what painting a house (or room)
Don't need a lot of images that can advertise what they are selling
And countless other reasons!

Small or Growing Businesses

Smaller businesses and those that are growing larger than ever may find that they need to let their audience in on business changes, if there are any.

This may include newsletters or simply information about new services that are offered. Longer emails of this type tend to have one goal in mind: showcase a ton of content so people will understand how the business is running and to click on a CTA button to find out more or make a sale.

What's Next in Marketing Emails?

The one common theme we got from all our marketing experts is your email needs to provide value to your readers. If you can say the same thing with less words, then do so.

You shouldn’t be too concerned about making sure your emails fall within a certain word count. Bottom line is if your emails contain valuable content or offers, your subscribers are going to want to read your email despite the length.

Some good email marketing software includes Hubspot and Mailchimp. But only one email marketing tool is free for life. No free trial because there's no need! Check out templates and all the features Messaging provides with TruVISIBILITY.