In-depth research is a great method to improve performance. It is expensive, so it’s much better if someone else does it for you. Recent, well supported, research shows that the best wordage for an email marketing campaign is between 75 and 100 words.

You should treat the research of others with care, especially if you don’t know the details of their methods. In this case, 40 million marketing emails were studied so we can safely assume, I think, that the case has been proved. You can now go off to rewrite all your emails that don’t fall within these limits.

But wait; with just a 1% increase, the optimum goes up to 50-175 words. Another 1% raises the higher number to 200. Basically, the research shows that the number of words used in a marketing email doesn’t matter all that much. It’s given us a norm.

If you subscribe to other email marketing lists, perhaps those of some of the large international online market places, you will notice that some of their emails have very few words. How low can we go? One on my phone at this moment shows just 27.

The research gives us the clear direction that there’s limited point in having a specific wordage target for emails. The good news is that it helps us in other ways. 

It seems that from 50 to 200 words there’s much of a muchness, so if you have said all that a potential purchaser will need to know, and you’ve hit them with the main specs, just go with it. If it scans, you have hit the target.

There’s a substantial drop off in returns below 50, 6% for 25 words and then 8% to 10. A clear lesson there. However, why should a class-leading company drop to 27? They must be aware of the research.

The point was, I think, that it was personalised. I had bought a consumable item in the past, and they’d worked out it was due a replacement. All I was after was price.

In brief, don’t get too wound up about wordage. How many? It all depends.