When a prospective student opens an email from your school, what happens next? Do they skim past it, or do they engage? While it may seem like brevity is best, emails that are too short can fail to provide enough substance to hold a student’s attention — or drive them to take action.
Surprisingly, email length isn’t the biggest factor affecting open-to-click rates. Other elements, like the call to action (apply vs. inquire vs. yield), campaign type (triggered vs. scheduled vs. ad hoc), and audience segmentation (responders vs. non-responders), all play a significant role. But length does matter.
A recent study of 1,660 email campaigns conducted by Capture Higher Ed reveals that longer emails — within a certain range — consistently perform better. Even when accounting for variables like audience type and the number of links, email length had a measurable impact.
According to the data, increasing from 110 words to 210 words leads to about a .3 percentage point increase in open-to-click rate. The median open-to-click rate was about 1.5 percent, so this represents a sizable lift.
The best-performing emails are between 180 and 250 visible words. So, the conclusion isn’t to write epics but to write emails a bit longer than you might be inclined to.
Here’s what the distribution of emails has looked like over the last year. Instead of most emails being between 150 and 200 words, it would be better if most were between 200 and 250.
The takeaway: Emails with between 180 and 250 visible words perform the best in driving clicks after opens. This is on the higher end of Capture’s emails on behalf of clients. So, on average, we should be writing longer emails … with more in that range.
By John Foster, Data Scientist, Capture Higher Ed
