Long Form Emails Or Short Form Emails – Which Work?
Published: 30 December, 2022
Your prospects’ attention spans are getting shorter, and decision-makers are not getting less busy.
The natural response is to keep emails as straightforward as possible but at the same time as attention-grabbing as humanly possible. So it’s more than reasonable to think “the shorter, the better” when emailing prospects.
It turns out that’s not true. Research from Gong has demonstrated that longer prospecting emails sent by sales teams have significantly more efficacy in booking meetings than short-form emails.
How can this be?
The research shows that there’s a fundamental difference between “short” and “concise.” prospecting emailing content. The current expert opinion seems to agree that short is about length. A short email is maybe 30 words or less, and that concise is about length and meaning.
Most importantly, it is about crafting a message that is valuable whilst still being compact, and clear. There are no sacred cows for an email that runs to 150 words or more, that contains important information and that’s succinct and pertinent to the prospect.
Despite common misconceptions, longer-form prospecting emails (30-150 words) work well if they’re packed with value for the prospect. This also means that the prospect is well-defined and fits your Ideal Customer Profile. That means you include information that connects the prospect or their company to your fund.
You can afford a longer email if your email is personalized, direct, and intentional in every sentence. That is the power of marketing automation.
And here is an example of a perfect prospecting email – Personalisation
So obviously when you do the targeting and get the quality data, and you get the messaging, and you do these two pieces, it can be very easy to say, cool, let’s send off a thousand emails.
The reality is everyone’s doing that. Truly everyone is doing that. And to actually stick out in the inbox to really make it compelling, you are really different – personalization is critical.
Now, this is nothing new. Personalization is something that sales experts have been talking about since 2010. Ten years ago, they were talking about it. They’re talking about it now.
Personalization is actually communicating to the reader that, you took some time to research them and that you understand them and here’s how you can help and add value.
How do you get to that? You go look through their blog posts and you see what they’re talking about and see if there are any patterns. You look at compelling events that have happened and see if you can mention that that’s relevant to the problem that you solve. You look at their public market filings to get clues on what’s top of mind for these people.
That’s a great way to do it as well. You look at everything published online by this person and start to piece together what’s going on in their business that relates to this problem or the macro trend you solve.
And that’s how you personalize. That’s true personalization. That’s not creepy personalization. And when you do that, your emails and your outreach and your ads and everything else will start to really stand out because they will look at this and say, oh, this person really took the time to research.
