When you are designing your next marketing email or newsletter you will probably face this conundrum – Should i opt for a short and punchy email newsletter or long and detailed. The use of each option has its own advantages/disadvantages.

Today in this first section we are going to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of opting for a short more punchier email body.

A short and punchy email newsletter

Many marketeers will opt for a short email newsletter. This will typically advertise the product/service in a headline figure and only contain a few lines of descriptive text. Deciding to keep your email marketing campaign short will bring several benefits:

• Creating an email which only contains 200 words as apposed to 2000 will take much less time to write. Therefore designing your next newsletter is not such a time consuming process.
• Perfect for short attention spans. If you are emailing someone at work, they probably wont have the time to sit reading your long email. A short punchy email which quickly conveys the message will probably be more successful.
• Short punchy emails will help your message stand out, rather then getting lost in a mass of text

However designing all your email campaigns to be short and too the point brings along several negative implications. Short email campaigns using many sales terms – such as ‘offer, discount’ without other rich content to contract your use of overly sales based words will increase your chances of slipping into a spam filter. Long content rich emails are considered much more legitimate by spam filters compared to the short offer message. Think of the ‘do the opposite as a spammer’ rule of thumb – your typical spam email will contain the viagra offer and nothing else. Prove you are a real person to the spam filter by writing a full content rich email.

Also if you decide to opt for a shorter email, you will have less space to convey your knowledge and expertise which you offer. While you have the space to advertise your product/service you may not go into detail about why the customer should use you. Your email may not be going the extra mile to make you stand out from your competitors.

Part 2 …

In the second part we will analyse the positives and negatives about opting for a longer more text rich email campaign. Part 2 follows tomorrow!