If you want people to read–and hopefully respond–to your emails, you should really pay attention to the data.
Email service Boomerang, which lets you schedule emails into the future as well as find out who’s read them, did a little research into its own customers to find out what, exactly, will get recipients to read your missives.
Turns out, if you write like an emotional 3rd grader, you’ll get better results.
Boomerang’s got seven specific tips based on its own data on what kind of emails get the most responses. First up, you’ll want to make sure that the reading grade level of your email isn’t too high. Emails written at a 3rd grade level got a 54 percent response rate, as opposed to a 45 percent rate for high-school-level missives, or a 39 percent rate given to those written at a college level.
Emotionally, emails with more passionate words scored higher, too.
“Emails that were slightly to moderately positive OR slightly to moderately negative elicited 10-15% more responses than emails that were completely neutral,” writes the Boomerang team in a blog post.
Which makes sense, really, as we’re all wired to filter out the neutral and pay special attention to stuff that makes us happier or gets our blood boiling.
Making sure your emails are short and to the point seems to be a fantastic strategy as well, though you don’t want to do what my old supervisor did and just drop 10-20 words into an email and call it good. Seriously, that guy really came off as uncaring.
The sweet spot, says Boomerang, for emails is between 50 and 125 words, which get above 50 percent response rates. Things decline after that to about 44 percent response if you write anything longer to about 500 words. If you must go long, you’re still ok, as the response didn’t drop until about 2000 words or more (about 35 percent response rate). If you need to send a really long email, maybe it should be an attachment.
Head on over to Boomerang for all seven tips to make your emails more effective, and try to keep it short, not too sweet, and able to be read by a 3rd grader.
Source: Boomerang
