Two Big Reasons to Keep Your Emails Short
When it comes to your customer- or client-facing emails, you generally want to make them as short as possible. Get in, get to the point, and get out.
There are at least two big reasons to keep your emails as short as possible.
Here are my two reasons why:
To show your audience that you respect their time and attention above all else. Think about it: do you like reading through medium-length to long emails? With how busy you assuredly are, I’m guessing you answered No. I do too.
To not risk email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. cutting off your email after a certain number of characters. Yes, this is a real thing. Check out the bottom of a client email below, during testing and before the final, shorter version was approved to send to their customers. If you don’t test for this, you could have an important call to action (CTA) — possibly with a big-ticket sale attached to it — not even get in front of your audience.
Since it’s very easy for emails to quickly become too long, I recommend you use this lens for both outside stakeholder emails and for internal team emails. If you do this consistently, everyone wins. Your audience gets only the most important and relevant information, and you get more time — time not spent making emails longer — to invest elsewhere in your business or nonprofit organization.
