If I had a dollar for every time I heard the question, how long should an email newsletter be …

The copywriters, graphic designers, web developers, marketers and other creative pros I know like to talk shop. One favorite topic is the ideal length of an email newsletter, and we never come to a consensus.

One of my designer friends likes her email newsletters to be short. I swear by the longer, story-style I use and the positive feedback I get on it.

Who’s right — my creative pro friend or me?

I’m sure someone somewhere studied this topic to find the answer. A highly paid researcher sent email newsletters of differing lengths to people in focus groups who rated them from 5 (“I adore it”) to 1 (“It burned my eyes”).

I don’t need to google studies like this because there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to the “how long should an email newsletter be” question!

Email stats only take you so far

I’ve been in marketing for more than two decades and have written hundreds of email messages. I analyzed many of those email blasts, staring at reports showing open rates, click-throughs and email-referrer stats. I’ve compared A/B split test results, where one audience segment received one message and the other group received a variation.

Some of the email marketing results disappointed me, some made me cheer and many made me feel meh. Truth be told, I didn’t learn all that much from email campaign stats, and I was never able to correlate stellar results with an email length that worked every time. This was the case back when I worked in Corporate America, and this is still the case today in the email marketing work I do for small businesses.

Why, oh Why Won’t People Open My Emails?

Getting worked up about dismal email open rates is a fool’s errand we should all agree to avoid. That’s because as consumers — humans! — our attention and interest in marketing messages are shaped by things an email sender can’t possibly guess. The marketer in me knows this even as I go into Mailchimp several (okay, 10) times after my email newsletter goes out to see if the open rate’s hit 50%. (That’s my personal target.)

I don’t take it personally when people ignore my email newsletter or my clients’, for that matter, because I know our audiences could be:

• • Busy when they receive our email and only read the subject line.
  • Stressed out about the hundreds of unread emails in their inbox and ours is just one more annoyance.
  • Saving our email in a “Read Later” folder in Gmail but later never comes.
  • Tired of seeing our emails and decide to unsubscribe.
  • Fans of us/our business and want to read our email but still ignore it.

What if There’s No Answer to the Email Length Question?

Knowing we can’t craft the perfect email newsletter to an optimal length shouldn’t frustrate us. It should free us. If there’s no ideal length, that shifts our focus to delivering the best email newsletter content we can write (or hiring a skilled copywriter to write it for us — hint hint).

Before you click away to google “best email newsletter content,” repeat after me: No article on the web can reveal the best content for us. Searching for content ideas is fine (and I share some of mine below), but we must do the harder work of considering our email list (and the real-deal people on it) and explaining how our business and expertise can offer them value in a way that feels timely, genuine and wanted. You know, the opposite of spam.

What’s best for your audience won’t be best for mine. For my readers, “best” means something that helps a small business owner pick up a new marketing tip or be motivated to finally take up and tackle a long-overdue marketing opportunity. “Best” also means they stay subscribed because they like hearing from Melanie the Marketer each month.

Write as Much or as Little as the Topic Demands

My creative pro friends and I will likely debate this topic again and again. So if you find a study that unequivocally states the perfect number of characters, sentences or paragraphs for an email newsletter, let me know and I’ll tell them what you found.

Until then, I’ll keep recommending email newsletters to clients as an essential component of a strategic marketing plan and working on my own monthly missive. (Earlier this year, I had some struggles making it a priority but I’m back on track now, thanks to wise counsel from my business coach to get help with my admin work.)

Whether I write a long message or a short one won’t be my focus. I’ll write as much as the message calls for, keeping the audience in mind and making sure the email is pleasing to look at with subheads, short paragraphs, images, etc., to break up the copy.

Hope this helped you … and happy newsletter publishing!

Images Credit: Stokkete on Shutterstock