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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