keep it short
If you’re choosing a novel, you won’t be put off by it being 200 pages long, or maybe even 500 – some people happily tackle a novel by Dostoyevsky.
The same is certainly not true of email. Email is generally unsolicited and its essential to catch the readers attention quickly. A long email is an immediate turn-off because its clear from the outset that considerable time and effort is called for from the reader, and with no guarantee that this will prove worthwhile.
To put it simply, the shorter your email is the more chance it
has of being read. If all you really want to do is get a simple point
across
and you can do it in one sentence, then do it. Padding it out to make
it look
longer is a tactic you might have used for school essays, but its
completely
wrong for email. In any event try to keep your mail below 5 lines.
break up your emails
If you have a body of information to get out to your audience, it doesn’t all have to go in one email, you can break it up and send, say, one installment per week. For instance, I was involved with pensions department who planned to send out information to members on their investment options. The email the last time they did this was 1500 words, and they got no response, and no members exercised their option to managed their own investment funds. I got them to send out this email ‘Did you know you can manage the investment of your pension fund yourself? If you’d like to know more call your pension team on……’. They got a steady stream of intertest for a week.