A great question about email length:
“…you say you shoot for an email length of around 200-400 words, but most of your emails as of late have run between 900-1200 words. Any particular reason for this shift or do you just have a lot more to say these days?”
My answer:
When I first started doing daily emails I bought into the shtick that they should be short (few lines and a link). Then, I wisened up and realized it’s better to write full length emails. And at the time I was having a lot of success with 300-500 words. It wasn’t a hard rule. But it did force me to learn how to write pithy, get to the point, basically take my first draft and cut it in half in word count while still making it work.
A very powerful writing exercise, incidentally.
I still recommend that to those not used to writing emails.
But it is more of a general guideline until one learns the craft of pithy writing. Especially since people like to go off on tangents about the time aunt Martha made soap in the grove but that has nothing at all to do with whatever they are selling. But it did not take long to realize longer emails can be a whole lot better in my business when I started experimenting with 600, 700, even 900+ word emails.
And the exact opposite happened that I originally thought would:
My sales and engagement usually went up.
Certainly the quality of customer was much higher.
Not every time, in every case, with every promo.
But as long as I was using solid direct response copywriting, writing from the gut, and doing it with intensity and lots of Forward Intent (purposely making it a little harder and taking a little more time than needed, not just going through the motions), they almost always were getting more sales, engagement, replies, trolling (which is good, for a whole variety of reasons I won’t go into here), forwards to peers/friends, invites to teach on podcasts and speak at events, ideas for whole books and courses coming to me as I was writing them, and the list goes on.
The short ones of 300 – 500 words?
Good, but not nearly as much.
Although I still mix them into my campaigns.
Probably the single most overall engaging email (it wasn’t selling anything) I ever wrote was on January 1 last year – which was a 2,500+ word, 6-page email eulogy for my dog Zoe who had just passed a few days earlier.
That got tons of replies, stories shared, relationships strengthened, etc.
Many of those people ended up becoming customers last year, too, I noticed. Which is just further proof not everything can be tracked with a spreadsheet. Frankly, the intangibles are far more long term profitable in my experience.
(Which I wrote an entire Email Players issue about last Fall)
Nowadays:
I’m often hammering out 1,500 – 2,000 word emails without even thinking about it or caring or even looking at the word count unless I just am curious for whatever reason. The 25+ emails last month that sold the 150th milestone Email Players issue were clocking in at over 2,000 words in most cases. Those long emails + plus the insane nature of the offer turned into around 70 new subscribers.
Many of them took various upsells, etc.
And many will be with me for months and years to come.
Impossible to calculate how much those emails are “worth.”
But it ain’t exactly chicken feed..
Anyway, it all reminds me of something the man universally considered to be the world’s greatest living copywriter Gary Bencivenga once said about direct mail when he granted an interview to Ken McCarthy nearly 20 years ago, that is proving to be just as true for my business in email today:
“Anyone who says long copy doesn’t work is out of their minds”
All right, end of story.
More on my email methodology here:
Ben Settle
