People average 11 seconds with marketing messages
Tick tock. People spend, on average, 11 seconds reading email blasts or updates, according to a report by 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.)
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.
The Constant Contact research also showed that three or fewer images get the highest click-throughs.
Sales emails of 50 to 125 words had the best response rates, according to a study of more than 40 million emails by Boomerang.
But, on average, people actually read about 36 words of an email. That’s the number of words people can read in 11 seconds. And that, according to that Litmus research, is the average amount of time people spend with emails.
Are your emails too long? How is that affecting your open and click-through rates?
How can you get your emails opened?
Your subject line is only one of four elements recipients consider before deciding whether to open or click.
If you’re only writing the subject line, you’re losing 75% of your chance to get opened.
Learn to address all four elements of “the envelope” at Think Inside the Inbox, our email-newsletter- and email-marketing-writing workshop that begins Oct. 17.
Plus: Learn how to write email subject lines that get clicked, how to increase campaign revenue by 760% by going beyond personalized emails, and how one organization multiplied campaign success by 1,000% by adding one more data point to tailored emails.
Save up to $100 with our group discounts.
