email-style

Email voice & style

An email arrives uninvited, in a stack of other mail, and gets a second of attention before someone decides to read or delete. Write for that second first and the body second.

• One email, one job. Decide the single thing you want the reader to do before you write a word, and cut anything that competes with it. Two calls to action means most readers take neither.
• Front-load everything. The point goes in the first line of the body, not after a warm-up paragraph. Many people read only the subject and the first line in a preview pane.
• Short paragraphs, 1 to 3 sentences. More white space than you would use on a web page, because the reading column is narrower and the attention is thinner.
• Write to one person. "You", not "our users". A newsletter that sounds like a broadcast gets treated like one.
• No fake urgency, no fake scarcity, and no manufactured personalization. "Quick question" on a mail that is not a question trains people to distrust the sender, and it costs more than the open it buys.
• Say who this is from and why they are getting it, early, when the list may not remember signing up.
• Links carry their own meaning. "Read the migration guide", never "click here": link text is what screen readers announce out of context, and it is what a scanner reads instead of the sentence around it.
• Every informative image needs alt text that describes it, and no image carries information that is not also in text. The Outlook desktop clients are the main remaining blockers of images, so an email whose point lives in a graphic arrives blank for those readers. Alt text describes; it never sells.
• Always write the plain text version. It is what some clients render and some people prefer, and an autogenerated one reads as broken.

Subject line and preview text

They are one unit and they are the only copy most recipients will ever see. Write them together, after the body, when you know what the mail actually says.

• Front-load. Put the real message in the first 35 to 40 characters, because that is what survives truncation on a phone. Front-loading is the one thing every source agrees on; the exact character count to aim for is contested, so don't treat one as a rule.
• The preview text extends the subject; it never repeats it and never restates the headline. Use it for the second most interesting thing in the email.
• Never leave preview text unset. The client fills the gap with whatever the HTML starts with, which is usually "View this email in your browser".
• Specific beats clever. A subject that says what is inside outperforms a subject that hints at it, and it keeps its promise, which is what protects the next send.