In email marketing, keeping a keen eye on email copy’s length is important. Whether you are launching a campaign for your newly launched product range or sending an abandoned cart reminder to your customers, your email length significantly influences if you will be successfully turning your potential leads into customers or not.
Thus, email marketers and copywriters always stress the words needed to design a perfect and impactful email for their customers. However, even after all these years of utilising emails as a marketing practice, their debates have not concluded.
The most straightforward answer to this undecided concept of short or long emails is, “It depends.”
Yup, you read that right. In email marketing, the perfect word count for emails depends on various factors, and by understanding these factors, you can create a powerful email with the right amount of words that engages your leads and drives sales.
And this is exactly what we plan to do for you in this article. Here, we will comprehensively dig deeper into the concept of email copy lengths and talk about its best practices.
Email Marketing – What’s So Special About It?
In today’s era, various advanced tools and technologies have taken the marketing industry by storm.
Many people consider email marketing a dead strategy. However, surprisingly, it is one of the most cost-effective and profit-generating plans any business can follow.
According to a report by Radicati Group, the number of email users globally is approximately 4.6 billion in 2025. Furthermore, this figure of worldwide users is expected to reach 4.8 billion by 2027.
With this vast audience worldwide, email marketing is a significant, powerful, and highly influential aspect of every promotional strategy. Whether you are associated with the retail industry or running a marketing startup, it is an excellent way to reach out to your targeted audience and promote your products and services to achieve higher conversions.
According to Statista, 30% of marketers consider email marketing to have the highest return on investment (ROI) compared to other digital marketing channels. Furthermore, 18% of the brands achieved a $70 investment for every $1 spent.
Want to hear even better news? 88% of email users check their inbox multiple times a day, according to a survey report about email users conducted in 2023.
Thus, the benefits of email marketing are limitless for businesses. As a brand, whether a startup or a global enterprise, you can not turn a blind eye to this effective and magical strategy. Here’s a quick rundown of a few of the benefits of email marketing before we move to the concept of perfect email word count.
- Email marketing can be used for diverse purposes like reminders, promotions, subscribers, newsletters, vouchers, contacts, appointments, and many more.
- It is cost-effective as it requires a minimal budget to function as compared with other digital marketing channels.
- You can establish a direct communication line with your customers and targeted audience without relying on any third-party platform.
- Emails have a significant prospect of personalisation, providing excellent value to leads and turning them into loyal and returning customers.
- Email marketing campaigns can significantly save time and effort when integrated with automation.
- It enables you to monitor the campaign’s performance, like tracking open rates and user behaviour, to optimise the campaign for better results.
Email Copy Length: Should it be Long or Short?
Research says that more than 149,513 emails are sent per minute. This means the approximate number of emails sent daily is around 215,298,720.
Thus, with the vast exchange of emails between customers, leads, and businesses, whether for promoting products, increasing brand awareness, or sharing queries, you have to be impactful to deliver your message clearly and effectively engage your customers. And in this regard, the email length significantly matters for your brand.
Deciding whether your email copy needs to be long or short to be successful doesn’t depend on your preferences, thoughts, or likings. Instead, several factors impact the email lengths and help you figure out the perfect word count for every email you send to your customers.
So, let’s have a detailed look at these factors one by one and crack the email marketing code.
1. Truly Understand Your Targeted Audience
Understanding the targeted audience is the foundation of your email marketing strategy. To design a result-driving email, you must be aware of your lead’s demographics, including their age, gender, profession, interests, hobbies, needs, desires, preferences, and struggles.
Thus, deeply knowing your customers can create a striking and best copy with adequate length. Once you know how much your audience is aware of your brand, you can decide whether you have to comprehensively talk about the benefits of your products or just a simple paragraph with a prominent CTA, which is enough to take their debit out of their wallets.
Similarly, instead of thoroughly explaining every bit of your product, you can highlight the benefits that resonate with their life’s struggles and motivate them to purchase.
2. Follow the Objectives of Your Campaign
Emails are a diverse strategy that can be used for various purposes like appointment reminders, abandoned cart information, query resolution, confirming a purchase, subscribing to newsletters, welcoming emails, and many more.
However, sticking to your email objective is essential to design a perfect email. Suppose you are sending a reminder about an appointment to your customer. In it, you don’t have to be comprehensive. A short, concise, and direct email can be enough for you and your customer. On the other hand, if you are approaching your lead with your newly launched product, a long email with complete details of the product, including its benefits, ingredients, guide, online purchase links, and pricing, will be beneficial.
Hence, by staying true to your email objective, you can automatically figure out whether a short email will work for your customers or if you have to design a long, comprehensive one.
3. Design an Effective CTA
CTA, abbreviated for Call To Action, is the real hero of the whole email marketing plan as it motivates your customer to take actions that ultimately contribute to your brand’s success. Whether you ask your leads to subscribe to your newsletter, like social media profiles, purchase products, visit the stores, or take a quote, a CTA will help you produce results and drive success.
CTA can be a phrase, a sentence, or a paragraph. It could compromise two words like Buy Now or Visit Now, stressing the action. Meanwhile, it could be a comprehensive paragraph about how purchasing your product will help the customer.
Therefore, it is essential to ensure that your CTA is converting the messages and providing customers a clear path for action.
Best Practices for Perfect Email Word Count
The emails have four components: the subject line, preheader, body of the email, and CTA. There are specific recommendations about the word count of each of these components to ensure a perfectly designed email. However, these limits are pretty flexible, and you can change them depending on your niche, customers’ expectations, and needs.
Let’s have a look at these general word count recommendations:
- The word limit for an idea subject line ranges from 28 to 50 characters. Keeping it under 40 characters can help clear visibility in the inbox, making customers more likely to open the email.
- The preheader, the summary of the email appearing behind the subject line, should have between 40 and 100 characters.
- Here comes the central part: the email body. It should range between 50 to 200 words. Although 200 words might sound less, it is a recommended limit, which is considered enough for brands to convey their message without losing the interest of their readers. However, you can make the email body more or less depending on the previously discussed factors. You can use a word counter to count the words exactly and avoid exceeding the limit.
- Finally, make CTA short, sweet, direct, and engaging. Ideally, it can be 2 to 5 words, but you can provide a small paragraph if needed to achieve the goal successfully. Just make sure that your readers are effectively motivated to take action.
Final Words
In conclusion, writing an email that is direct, engaging, and result-driven is an art, which means there is no specific or fixed method for it. By taking advantage of the flexibility and diversity of email marketing, you have to focus on your target audience and campaign objective and then design an email copy that is not only engaging and fulfilling but also resonates with the expectations and preferences of your targeted audience.
