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A year ago, I had an idea for an email experiment around the notorious question:
“Does the size matter?”
And by “size”, what I really mean is “length”.
And by “length”, I mean the optimal length of an email.
(Stop it!)
I keep getting asked about this to this day, and I knew that for me to make my point, I would need to go extreme…
Here’s what I wanted to prove:
The length of the email doesn’t matter as long as the topic is relevant and the writing is good.
The engagement (opens->clicks-> replies) will be high if the trust is there.
Luckily, I had just the right real-life story to use for that.
In May 2023, I was a part of an EU-funded fellowship for female-identifying entrepreneurs. It was an almost-all-paid program with the promise of helping us grow our 0-5yo businesses, in exchange with us supporting the local communities we were posted in with our expertise.
It was the third cohort and the online reviews were glorious.
… Only that this experience had significant cult-like aspects.
(My group and I were gaslighted heavily when we had any bad feedback, we needed to be “grateful for the experience” on a constant basis, that program and my group’s accommodation were far from what we were promised, major sleep depravation and no way to be alone ever, and the main organizer welcomed everyone by singing “Kumbaya my Lord” at the closing event - just to name a few “highlights”!)
When the program finished, I rushed to my temporary room in Madrid and wrote about my experience, from the moment I applied until the moment I was done, in great detail.
It took me almost two full workdays to get it all written down.
But the idea of taxpayers’ money being spent on such a BS program with such false marketing andorganization was horrifying to me (7 Million euros!). The idea of this program having more women going through it without knowing what it could be like for them was gut-wrenching.
I wrote that piece, published it on my blog, and sent a short email with one call to action - “My 3-week experience, unfolded” (not my best one, and yet) that referred to the blog.
That piece, according to multiple text checkers, took about 30 minutes to read.
Here are the results:
48.9% open rate.
14.17% click-through rate.
Countless direct email replies.
(Just so we're clear, email benchmarks are around 25% opens, and about 2%-3% clicks.)
… And 1,599 views of the blog post alone (as to writing this) - it went viral among that fellowship’s circles a week later.
I also had dozens of women reach out to me on Linkedin, saying that what I’d been through was nothing compared to their experience, and mine was not as life-threatening or business-damaging as theirs.
I had women reach out to me and thank me for sharing my experience, as they were a part of the upcoming 4th cohort at the time, experienced the same BS during their online prep period, and decided to withdraw their participation.
And I got a few messages, months later, from women who read my piece, decided to stay in the fellowship anyway, and went through mentally abusive experiences while being there. They reached out to tell me that my critique helped them to prepare for such unfortunate scenarios in advance.
(I’m not sharing the details of others’ stories, because they aren’t mine to share.)
Moral of the story:
People’s attention span will be shorter than a fish’s if the topic and writing are irrelevant, and if the emotional connection doesn’t exist. On the other hand, they’ll be happy to read 30-minute, long-ass pieces if the topic, writing, and trust are on point.
Build the user experience around your audience’s existing behavior, not around how you wish them to behave. I knew that the clicks to my blog would be ridiculously high, even with a terrible CTA, because I’ve tracked how my people back then behaved with long emails vs. short emails with a link to a long blog post.
Don’t be afraid to go extremely long, extremely short, or any length in between. The size itself doesn’t matter. Your audience will show you what they prefer through their engagement (or lack of).
Last but not least, share your truth.
People will always have something to say.
But you never know who you could possibly help with your story, knowledge, and expertise.
If you want to read that piece yourself, you can do so here.
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