How Long Should My Email Be? Here’s the Ideal Email Length (Backed by Research)

How long should your emails be? It’s a question that marketers have been asking themselves for years. Go too long and you may overwhelm subscribers causing them to abandon your email.

Leave it too short and you may not fully get your message across.

Or even worse, you may risk coming across as being lazy, like you’re halfheartedly slapping a few words together and putting minimal effort into it.

So what’s the ideal email length?

Is there a target word count you should be aiming for?

In this post, I’ll tackle this topic at length by analyzing the data from a few different studies to look for trends.

The goal is to synthesize the information and come up with a definitive conclusion so you’ll know without a doubt how long your emails should be.

Let’s dive right in.

Boomerang’s Study

In 2016, Boomerang (a productivity software platform that syncs with Gmail) performed an exhaustive study involving over 40 million emails to determine which factors led to getting responses.

It’s actually the most comprehensive study I’ve come across.

One thing they discovered was that there is a clear correlation between word count and response rate.

Short (but not too short) emails received the highest response rate on average.

In fact, emails with 75 – 100 words had the highest response rate at 51 percent.

According to Boomerang’s findings, this would be considered the sweet spot.

However, there’s not a dramatic drop off if you go a bit lower to 50 words or a bit higher to 125 words, as the response rate is just one percent lower at 50 percent.

This would suggest that you should be in pretty good shape as long as your emails are between 50 to 125 words.

Here’s a good example of an email I recently received from Twitter that discusses Promote Mode.

It’s right in that neighborhood and contains 104 words.

But it’s important to point out that going any lower than 50 or higher than 125 is likely to reduce your response rate.

Hitting 150-175 words results in a 49 percent response rate, and 200 words results in a 48 percent response rate.

This isn’t major but shows that going beyond 125 words isn’t usually in your best interest.

Not only will it take you longer to write an email, it’s likely to diminish your response rate.

But where you see the big drop off is when you go really low with your word count to 25 words or less.

Notice that the response rate of a 25-word email is only 44 percent, and 10 words is by far the worst at just 36 percent.

Read more here.