In the email marketing industry, there are a lot of people who swear by the adage “content is king.” It’s one of the universal tenets in marketing – that you need attractive content to attract people. For a long time now many marketers automatically assume that it requires longer newsletters – because the longer the email, the more text content you can squeeze in. It’s not a matter of quality over quantity but quantity AND quality.
However, there are several trends that point to the industry moving towards shorter email newsletters. The change isn’t going to be instantaneous, but the trends have been bubbling underneath, and these are just the first signs that we can see:
People Spend Less Time on Email Compared to Other Activities Online
Don’t get us wrong, there’s still more email users than there are social network accounts and that’s not likely to change (particularly since Social Networking accounts require you to have an email address,) but a recent study by Nielsen reveals that people are now spending more time on social media sites than they do on their inbox. In fact, email ranks fifth in the list – right behind member communities/social media sites in the top five primary online activities.
What this points to is that people are less interested in staring at their inbox for too long, and want to get back to spending more time on social media. This doesn’t mean that you have to abandon your newsletter in favor of a Facebook page – it just means you have to incorporate social media into your newsletters more instead of trying to blast people with text content. A CTA pointing to a social networking site account will be effective as people will always subconsciously look for an excuse to do stuff they want, which in this case is browse their favorite social network.
Non-Profit Newsletters Are Paving the Way
Most marketers don’t notice this because the scope falls outside of their interests, but non-profit newsletters these days have been sending shorter emails that don’t get past the 250 word mark, instead resorting to pointing users towards other destinations such as a website, a social media page, or a video page. It’s slowly turning into a de facto industry standard as users become more accustomed to the shorter length and start expecting it from every newsletter.
The Inbox Zero Movement
People nowadays are attending seminars on how to empty their inboxes and maintain its empty state. In fact, Merlin Mann of 43folders.com has built an entire movement out of it, and it caught on enough that he did an hour long workshop for Google staff on it. Even the staff of the world’s largest email service want in on this Inbox Zero thing.
This means you’re basically fighting against people who want to empty their inboxes fast by reading everything ASAP, if you still send lengthy newsletters. Chances are, if it’s too long it might not even get read.
What Shorter Newsletter Means For You As an Email Marketer
Don’t take these rising trends as an indication that you have to drop your newsletter. Far from it. It just highlights one thing that has always been part of the business: optimization. Content is still king, but now you have to take steps to ensure that content is efficient enough to provide value without taking up too much screen real estate. It just needs a change in mindset as the lessons regarding brevity has always been part of marketing.
