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Maybe if you made it a two word email and removed the signature it would get 16x the engagement. Or if you had an empty email and put the question in the subject you’d get 32x engagement. Attention spans these days are terrible.
Subject: Hey
Body: Whaddya want?
It wasn’t just the length of the email body they changed in the 3rd variant... they also changed the subject line from “Welcome to Netlify” to “Question...”, but that change wasn’t mentioned as a potential contributor to the good result. I’m betting that change resulted in a big increase in open rate. I’m conditioned to ignore “Welcome to AcmeCo”-style emails.
* A paragraph explaining social networking and another paragraph explaining LinkedIn.
* A few paragraphs on the benefits of joining LinkedIn.
* A few paragraphs explaining that a LinkedIn invitation was special because it meant that the inviter trusted and respected the invitee and wanted to stay in touch professionally.
* A tiny blurb along the lines of "I’d like to add you to LinkedIn network."
Despite my expectations that one of the explanatory messages would be best, the short, vague blurb outperformed by a huge margin.
I've noticed this too in emails to coworkers. If the email is long enough, they just skip it to "read it later". This is quite frustrating, because sometimes you just _have_ to communicate some more words.
From my own experience, I make sure to never ask more than one question in an email. If you ask more, people will answer the first and ignore the rest.
> Even if you follow all the best practices around emails, genuinely want to help them, and spend a long time writing a personalized email, people still don’t respond. How do you write a personalized email for a new user?
"Netlify has proven exceptionally useful for innovative energy companies like yourself and {other energy industry client}"
I've noticed this too in emails to coworkers. If the email is long enough, they just skip it to "read it later". This is quite frustrating, because sometimes you just _have_ to communicate some more words.
The rest of the email can then be long, but at the end, always restate the question.
Shortening the text not only transmits the message more efficiently, it also allows the recipient to feel comfortable with writing a one-liner reply. You are actually lowering the threshold over which the person gains the will to start writing a response.
I've noticed this too in emails to coworkers. If the email is long enough, they just skip it to "read it later". This is quite frustrating, because sometimes you just _have_ to communicate some more words.
One of my managers gave me some guidelines here. If it's more than 100 words, cap it at 100 and schedule a meeting. It clearly is information-dense to the degree where a quick question/answer session will be helpful. From my own experience, I make sure to never ask more than one question in an email. If you ask more, people will answer the first and ignore the rest.
> Even if you follow all the best practices around emails, genuinely want to help them, and spend a long time writing a personalized email, people still don’t respond. How do you write a personalized email for a new user?
Hi, ${user_name}! How do you like our product? We are working hard on ${first_clicked_link}. BTW, ${user_browser} rules!
People have been leaving their emails, but surprisingly, even though the intent is very clear (I think), almost nobody has actually replied when I've emailed to open the conversation. The kinds of response rate percentages (My opening email is nothing like as long as the first one in this article, but it does contain a generic intro paragraph (thanks for leaving your email, I'm the founder, etc) which I include just for context and politeness, but which I've realised from reading this article may be causing people to just stop reading, thinking that it's an auto-generated response. I'll try some one liners from now on and see how it works out!