Tick tock. People spend, on average, 11 seconds reading email blasts or updates, according to a report by Litmus.

And that’s up 7% in the last five years. (The reason for the increase? More mobile-friendly emails, says Litmus.)

One of the best email marketing strategies, then, is to write short emails. (It may be almost as important as polishing your email subject lines.)

Why so short?

Why do people spend so little time with marketing emails?

• Too many emails. Organizations and individuals send out 306.4 billion emails a day, according to Statista. That’s a lot of competition for attention in the inbox. (And that doesn’t include all of the email marketing pieces, blog posts and other content marketing pieces screaming for your readers’ attention?
• Tiny screens. Around 61% of emails are opened on a mobile device, according to Adestra. That tiny screen causes all kinds of usability problems.
• Audience and sender sophistication. As email newsletters have become shorter, more visual and more scannable, subscribers have learned to expect more tightly edited e-zines.

How long should emails be?

So how long should your email be for the best open rate? To get people to land on your landing page? Depends on whom you ask — and on what type of email you are sending.

Emails of about 20 lines of text had the highest click-throughs, according to a study of more than 2.1 million customers by Constant Contact. Twenty lines is about 200 words. See another compelling, data-backed argument for 200-word emails

The Constant Contact research also showed that 3 or fewer images get the highest click-throughs.

Sales emails of 50 to 125 words had the best response rates, at just above 50%, according to a study of more than 40 million emails by Boomerang.

How long is 11 seconds?

But before you press Send, remember that Litmus research: People average 11 seconds with emails.

So how many words is 11 seconds?

Well, people read about 200 words per minute. So figure Average Reading Time, or A.R.T., a concept created by The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark.

To figure A.R.T., multiply the number of minutes you think people will spend reading your message by 200 words per minute. The result: your recommended word count.

We know that people will spend an average of 11 seconds — about 18% of a minute — with your email. So multiply one minute by 200 words per minute to get the recommended length of your email in words.

Also note that the percentage of emails read for more than 18 seconds grew to 44.4% in from 38.4% five years earlier.

If your email blast is in that lucky 44%, you can relax, kick back and take 60 whole words to communicate your email message.

Learn more about short emails

• What’s the best email newsletter length? [Data!]
• What’s the best email subject line length?
• To reduce email length, focus
• Ideal email length: short, but not too short
• 3 email newsletter formats that work
• What’s a good length for a concise paragraph online?
• What’s the best email readability?

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Sources: Mike Renahan, “The Ideal Length of a Sales Email, Based on 40 Million Emails,” HubSpot, July 11, 2018

Chad S. White, “Email Attention Spans Increasing,” Litmus, March 8, 2017

“Top 10 Email Clients in March 2019,” Upland Adestra

Jason Fidler, “New Data: How the Amount of Text and Images Impact Email Click-Through Rates,” Constant Contact

Alex Moore, “7 Tips for Getting More Responses to Your Emails (With Data!),” Boomerang.com, Feb. 12, 2016

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Call it the Goldilocks Conundrum: What character count is “just right” for subject line length?

If ever there were a question with an “it depends” answer, this is it. Before writing subject lines for your next email campaign, check out this research.

What can recipients see?

The number of characters displayed by devices and email clients — the weird term we use for Gmail, Apple Mail and other email service providers —varies widely. For instance, according to the Nielsen Norman Group:

• Outlook displays 78 characters on a browser at the full width of a 15″ laptop.
• Gmail on an iPhone displays 36-38 characters.
• Yahoo mail displays 38-42 characters on an iPhone before truncating the rest.

To avoid getting your subject line truncated, the folks at the Nielsen Norman Group recommend that you limit your subject line to 40 characters.

30 to 90 characters “is the dead zone, and will reduce the chances of opens and clicks in an email.”

— Adestra

But while the average desktop inbox displays about 60 characters, according to a study by Return Path, mobile devices display just 25 to 30 characters. With more than half of your audience members opening your email via smartphone, doesn’t it make sense to make this your standard?

The argument for limiting subject lines to what people can see is that you retain control of the message. After all, you don’t want your truncated subject line to say “lice” when what you wrote was “license.”

But that might be too short …

Longer subject lines perform better.

Longer subject lines boost response rates, according to Adestra, a U.K.-based email service provider. Its analysis of more than 1 billion emails showed that subject lines of:

• 90 characters and more produced the highest response rates.
• 30 characters or less also performed well.
• 30 to 90 characters “is the dead zone, and will reduce the chances of opens and clicks in an email,” write Adestra’s Parry Malm and Mark Bonner, the report authors.

Why is longer better? You can communicate more benefits with more characters, Malm and Bonner write.

Longer subject lines perform better for B2B

So, consider using 90 characters or more to communicate more benefits, Malm and Bonner suggest. More details boost subject line performance when subscribers are highly targeted, according to research by Mailchimp.)

Short subject lines perform better.

Super-short subject lines also perform well, according to Adestra. Subject lines with:

• Word counts of one or two (5 to 10 characters) are most likely to gain opens and clicks.
• More than 14 words come in second in terms of performance.
• Two to 14 words reduce clicks and opens.

Super-short headlines perform best in B2B

So consider using fewer than 30 characters for snappy subject lines promoting an offer or requesting action, Malm and Bonner suggest. But stay out of the dreary middle when you write subject lines.

Here’s more about dueling research on email subject line length.

But does it really matter?

Subject line length is just one of many factors that affects open rates. In fact, subject line length accounts for 0.1% of email open rate variance, Phrasee calculates.

Subject line length accounts for 0.1% of email open rate variance.

— Phrasee

That’s hardly a statistical significance.

Return Path had similar findings: “Overall, our research indicates that there is actually no correlation between the length of a subject line and its read rate.”

And MailChimp found that “For most users, there is no statistical link between subject line length and open rate. But for subscribers reading your campaigns on mobile devices, shorter may be better.”

Test subject lines.

The solution? Before you press Send on your next email marketing campaign, test your short subject line against a longer one. And let your recipients tell you what’s just right.

Learn more …

• What’s the best length for social media channels?
• What’s the best length for web pages?
• What’s the best length for news releases?

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Sources: Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017

“The Art And Science Of Effective Subject Lines” (PDF), Return Path, September 2015

“True or False: Shorter Subject Line will give you Better Results,” upland Adestra, modified Oct. 17, 2019

Whitney Blankenship, 7 Email myths it’s time to stop following, Learn inbound, July 1, 2019

“What are some best practices in writing email subject lines?” MailChimp, Dec. 8, 2014

Parry Malm and Mark Bonner, “And the best subject line ever is …,” Adestra, 2012

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When should you use subscribers’ names in e-zines and email blasts?

After all, there are plenty of good reasons for personalizing emails:

• People are most interested in personal email messages, as well as in messages from organizations they’re affiliated with, according to a study by MailChimp.
• Some 28% of U.S. internet users would be more loyal to a brand if its email messages were personalized, according to a survey by Fresh Relevance and YouGov.
• And given all the tools for email customization out there, readers have grown accustomed to receiving personalized messages. Ignoring this can make it look like you’re behind the curve.

But name-calling in emails can be cheesy — even creepy — if you don’t handle it well. So use recipients’ and subscribers’ names only when you:

1. Have an established relationship.

Do subscribers have an account at your bank? Have they flown on one of your planes? Purchased one of your books?

Then go ahead: Call them by name.

And, given that you have this relationship, you probably know a few things about your subscribers. Use that information to truly personalize your material.

(Note: The recipient’s signing up for your e-zine does not constitute a relationship with the subscriber.)

2. Won’t offend subscribers with informality, fake familiarity or errors.

People know that a computer somewhere — and not the sender herself — attached that name to that email.

Using recipients’ names doesn’t make them feel special. Instead, it can feel cheesy. (It can also make recipients wonder what else you know about them.)

Plus, be careful with errors. If subscribers misspell, fail to capitalize or insert a fake name during the subscription process, you, too will misspell, fail to capitalize or insert a fake name when you email them. (And don’t get me started on “Dear Email.”)

Pro tip: Allow subscribers to change the name you use to address them in an Update profile link right from the e-zine.

3. Offer customized — and not just personalized — content.

Personalize your email message if you are delivering information:

• That subscribers requested on the sign-up page
• Based on subscribers’ buying or search history
• Targeted to subscribers’ location

In these cases, using subscribers’ names will help signal that they’re receiving customized information.

Aeroplan, for instance, sent out a newsletter that included recipients’ rewards balance and points history along with its current promotions. It used the recipients’ full name on the subject line and in the body of the email.

And Groupon’s daily newsletter listed deals only from the users selected city, making the information more useful and relevant.

That’s customized, not just personalized.

Note that including some information — names and partial account numbers, for instance — can distinguish your message from a phishing expedition and assure subscribers that you are who you claim to be.

Learn more about personalizing email subject lines:

• Tailor, don’t personalize, email subject lines: Don’t use their names unless you also customize content
• How to tailor email subject lines: Take personalization beyond name-calling
• Don’t personalize, localize email subject lines: Avoid ‘Ann, your e-zine is here’

What techniques do you use to personalize emails?

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Sources: Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6^th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017

“What are some best practices in writing email subject lines?” MailChimp, Dec. 8, 2014

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