7 Tips
for Getting More Responses to Your Emails (With Data!)
Over
the past year, our customers asked Boomerang to remind them if they didn’t get
a response to over 40 million emails. Writing emails that get responses is an
incredibly valuable skill – and what makes an email likely to get a response is
hard to determine.
There’s
a lot of advice about how to write a good email on the web, from general
writing advice to full sets of pre-written email templates. But almost none of
that advice shows the data behind it (usually because there isn’t any), and a
lot of it is contradictory.
So
when we set out to send out a year-in-review email to Boomerang users, we decided to make that email different from a
typical startup year-in-review email. Instead of focusing how much we’ve grown or showing off our swanky new logo, we decided to figure out what factors
really matter when you want to get a response to your messages and send that
instead.
The
results were so interesting that we decided to share them here as well.
Write like a 3rd Grader
Our most surprising finding was that the reading grade level of your emails has a dramatic impact on response rates. Emails written at a 3rd grade reading level were optimal. They provided a whopping 36% lift over emails written at a college reading level and a 17% higher response rate than emails written even at a high school reading level.
Write with Emotion
Another
significant factor in determining response rates is how positive (words like
great, wonderful, delighted, pleased) or negative (words like bad, hate,
furious, terrible) the words in the message are. Emails that were slightly to
moderately positive OR slightly to moderately negative elicited 10-15% more
responses than emails that were completely neutral.
Flattery
works, but excessive flattery doesn’t.
Write short (but not too short!) emails
The
sweet spot for email length is between 50-125 words, all of which yielded
response rates above 50%.
Response
rates declined slowly from 50% for 125-word messages to about 44% for 500-word
messages. After that, it stayed flat until about 2000 words, then declined
precipitously. So while the optimal length for an email is under 125 words, you
shouldn’t worry too much if you need a few extra.
Use short (very short) subject lines
Email
marketing veterans know that testing subject lines is a critical step in
designing an email campaign that will have a high open rate. Likewise, the
length of your subject line impacts response rates, and the optimal length is
shorter than we expected. Subject lines with only 3-4 words (excluding email
conventions like Re: and Fwd:) received the most responses.
Questions
The number of questions you ask in an email has a sweet spot, just like the number of words you write. We found that emails that asked 1-3 questions are 50% more likely to get a response than emails asking no questions. READ MORE ➤➤
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