It's common advice that you should keep your emails short; in most cases, I agree.
For example, if you're sending out cold emails, be concise and have a clear call to action.
But if you want to determine the ideal length of your drip emails, there's a better way than dogmatic adherence to either the "short vs long email is better" theory.
Make your drip emails as long as they need to be to achieve the desired effect.
To do that, you need to know where your readers are and where you want them to be.
Keep Your Audience's Mindset and Expectations in Mind.
Let's look at one of our lead nurturing drip campaigns, our free startup sales course. It consists of relatively long emails. Signing up gives you a new sales lesson every third day.
People join with the intent of learning how to sell. They expect to be educated. If I sent out short motivational sales quotes, most people would unsubscribe or complain because that's not the practical how-to information they expected based on what we promised them on our sign-up page.
But then consider the life of someone working in a startup: they're busy all the time. So even though they have a desire to learn, they operate within real-time constraints. They expect results and practical advice, not fluff.
When planning your email drip campaign, imagine yourself as the person you want to reach. (The best way to do this is to have actual one-on-one conversations with a couple of these people, ask many questions, and listen very carefully to what they tell you.)
An Example of Really Effective Drip Email...
In this drip marketing campaign, one email—the longest email in the sequence — generates the highest number of free trial signups for our sales CRM.
Here it is:
Noticed something?
That email is a sales letter.
We write about
- The story of how Close came to be,
- The major pain points our solution eliminates,
- How it makes the life of a salesperson better,
- Why we're different from every other sales software provider out there,
- What our higher purpose is,
- What customers say about us,
- How you can benefit from Close,
- Why you should not buy our sales CRM...
Why Don't We Break This Long Email up Into Several Shorter Emails?
Plenty of self-proclaimed experts would look at this email and say: "Nobody will ever read such a long email! You should break this up into several emails to make it more easily digestible."
But at that point, the engagement level of our average subscriber is so high that they want to read it, and it would lose effectiveness if we break up the narrative flow.
There's a lot more to be said about what makes this particular email work, but we want to stay focused on this post's length.
Does Your Drip Marketing Appeal to Various Buyer Types?
Is this email so long that plenty of people won't read it because their eyes glaze over just looking at all that text?
Yup.
Is it so informative and engaging that it makes some people take the next step and sign up for a 14-day free trial of our sales software?
You bet it does ( it works so well that we started sending this drip email to trial users, and it instantly became our highest-converting trial user email).
Different people have different ways of making decisions. Some want to read extensively and learn many details before making a buying decision, while others want a short value proposition with three bullet points.
That's why it's good to create drip marketing content that appeals to different decision-making styles.
Make Your Long-Form Emails Scannable
Even though our email is long, it doesn't look like an intimidating textbook. It has a very clear structure—there are subheads, certain words, and sentences are bolded, and we use bullet points and numbered lists.
This makes the letter easier to navigate. Recipients can quickly scan the email without fully reading it, and maybe one bullet point or one phrase catches their attention and makes them read a certain paragraph.
When crafting long drip emails, format your text to make it easy to read.
Think Long-Form Emails Don't Work for Your Market?
Many people who work in startups snub long-form drip emails. They think these lengthy letters might work for people buying hair growth potions but not for their sophisticated B2B prospects.
If you're one of these people, I encourage you to test this assumption: send out one really well-crafted and strategically timed drip email and see if it creates better results.
What Joanna Wiebe has said about sales pages also holds for drip emails:
"Like everything, the length of your page depends on your visitors and prospects. It’s not about picking one length or style of page out of a hat and simply shoving your messages into that." - How Long Should Your Pages Be?
Want to Learn More About Writing Long-Form Copy?
The same principles that made long sales copy so effective a hundred years ago when marketing pioneers like Robert Collier and Claude Hopkins were practicing "salesmanship in print" still make it effective today.
Here are some great case studies of how web-savvy companies have utilized and experimented with long sales copy - studying them will give you plenty of ideas to create killer drip emails:
