You Should be very careful, when writing emails on behalf of your business to customers. A new study shows that “When writing an email, every word counts. It starts with your subject line: Open rates drop from 24% to 17% on average when subject lines exceed 35 characters. And with mobile email open rates rising more than 300% since April 2011, the case for brevity is more important than ever.”
Exactly 60% of respondents agreed that a concise email is acceptable, while less than 30% expressed similar feelings toward longer emails. Additional findings revealed:
- The opposition to verbose emails increases with age: 70% more respondents between the ages of 55 and 64 find the practice unacceptable compared with those between 18 and 24.
- Females have a slightly higher preference for concise emails compared with their male counterparts: More than 60% of women find shorter emails acceptable, while just over 55% of men share similar views.
- Level of education has no effect on length: The majority of each group — no degree, bachelor’s degree, and graduate degree — prefers a concise email over a longer message.
- The top five greetings for all respondents are brief: Each greeting is only one word attached to the recipient’s name.
The most objectionable email trends concern grammar, spelling, and fonts
Our research revealed the following:
- Nearly 80% of all respondents find spelling and grammatical errors the most unacceptable offenses.
- More than 70% of each age demographic found more than one spelling error unacceptable.
- Nearly 10% more females find a spelling error more unacceptable than males do.
- Respondents with graduate degrees are slightly more forgiving of grammatical errors than those with bachelor’s degrees or no degree.
- Exactly 70% of all respondents agree that excessive punctuation should be avoided.
- Nearly 50% more respondents with graduate degrees want to sound reliable compared with respondents who have no degree.
- More than 55% more respondents between the ages of 45 and 54 rewrite emails to sound more authentic compared with those between 18 and 24.
- The younger demographic prefers to sound more knowledgeable, with nearly 50% more rewriting emails to sound more intelligent compared with 45- to 54-year-olds.
Some More Facts for Email Marketing Below:
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- Changes in font size were disliked the most by respondents: Nearly 70% of respondents prefer fonts to be one size.
- The oldest demographic is more receptive to irregular fonts than any other: Less than 30% believe that using irregular typefaces (e.g., Comic Sans, Courier New, Impact, etc.) is “totally unacceptable.”
- The majority of male and female respondents have a preference for a single-colored font.
- More than 85% of respondents prefer an all-lowercase subject line to one in all caps.
- Respondents with a graduate degree tend to be slightly more lenient on multiple font sizes: Nearly 20% find the practice acceptable while less than 15% of respondents without a degree share similar views.
Source: BuzzStream, Fractl and HubSpot Blog
