The age-old question – should you be sending short or long email campaigns to your audience?
Long-form newsletters offer in-depth information, whereas short-form newsletters focus on quick consumption. Both types of campaigns can be useful for different reasons, as discussed below, to help you get the most out of your email marketing campaigns.
Long-Form Newsletters
Long-form newsletter campaigns typically exceed 1,000 words, providing comprehensive detail and information. These campaigns generally follow a structure of introduction, main body, and call to action (CTA). They can feature a single in-depth article or multiple shorter, segmented stories.
Long-Form Benefits
In-depth
These types of campaigns provide space for in-depth research, giving you the ability to present well-supported arguments and analysis. Additionally, it allows your business to provide detailed descriptions of products and services, explaining their features and benefits. By exploring various features, long-form newsletters can effectively educate your audience, build trust through expertise, and drive conversions by providing an understanding of your products or services.
Trust
Long-form email campaigns offer an opportunity for your brand to build trust with your audience. By creating high-quality content and sharing detailed insights, your brand can position itself as a reliable source of information, being market leaders and experts in your field. This can lead to boosted customer loyalty and increased brand awareness.
Engagement
Long-form content in newsletter campaigns can encourage users to spend a significant amount of time reading and interacting with the content. This type of email structure also gives your brand the opportunity to describe how products and services can solve customer challenges, further helping to increase conversion rates.
Long-Form Disadvantages
Although long-form campaigns have many advantages, they may not be suited to all audiences. Users often lose attention when reading too much information in one go – the average adult’s attention span is only 8.25 seconds – and without the option to bookmark the email, unlike a website, it often results in an email being deleted.
Additionally, many users now view emails on mobile devices, which make it harder to read long content on a smaller screen.
Both of the above results in a lower click-through rate to your website if that’s the ultimate goal.
Short-Form Newsletters
Short-form newsletter campaigns typically contain fewer than 1,000 words, prioritising concise and digestible readability. Users are able to quickly grasp the message of the content, making them ideal for initial outreach and follow up. They are also perfect for engaging subscribers who prefer to scan and absorb information rapidly.
Short-Form Benefits
Mobile Friendly
Short-form email campaigns are easier to scroll through on mobile devices compared to their long-form counterparts, and won’t get ‘clipped’ on email platforms. This allows users to view and digest the entire email easily and quickly, without having to load it on their desktop device or come back to read at a later date.
Ideal for Launches
When launching a new product or service, maximising visibility and creating an optimised launch are crucial for success. Short-form campaigns are ideal for product launches and promoting sales, as they grasp user attention and can highlight essential information, such as sale features and key product features, with strategically placed buttons for users to take action.
Faster to Produce
A benefit of short-form email campaigns is that they are faster to produce than long-form content, meaning that they can be created and sent out in a rush – for example if you have a sale ending soon, if there’s an outage or issue that users need to be aware of, or if your team is short on time. These are also ideal if you have a turnaround of a large volume of content on your website, such as an active blog.
Engagement
In addition to these types of emails working well for time-sensitive messages, they also work well for important announcements that require subscribers to read. Short-form campaigns allow you to capture users’ attention, creating curiosity, which in turn encourages them to click a link through to your website.
Short-Form Disadvantages
Although short-form campaigns can quickly capture audience attention, they can be limited when making a lasting impression. Additionally, a high frequency of short emails from a brand can lead to subscriber fatigue and an increased perception of spam, resulting in higher unsubscribe rates. What’s more, sending high volumes of short emails can result in leaving subscribers questioning the value of each communication.
Choosing Which is Best For You
Short-form and long-form campaigns each have their own strengths and weaknesses, making each suitable for specific objectives, scenarios and audience characteristics.
When deciding which structure campaign to opt for, take into consideration your audience’s reading habits, how much time they have to dedicate to reading, and the type of devices they primarily use to access content.
A/B testing is an effective tool that can be used to identify content that works best for your audience, allowing you to experiment with varying content lengths and formats, to gather insights into what resonates best with your email subscribers.
An alternative approach is to send short-form emails that link to long-form content hosted on your website or blog, that users can open and bookmark to read at a later date. This gives you the opportunity to spotlight content previews in an email, which offers an opportunity for users to seek more in-depth content if they choose to.
