Email Adaptation

Adapting copy into an email

Someone hands you words that were written for a page and wants them sent as mail. The job is not to shorten them. It is to work out what the email is for, which is almost never the same as what the page was for.

A page answers a question someone already had. An email interrupts someone who did not ask. So the page can afford to build an argument, and the email has to earn the click to the page.

How email gets read

Attention is brief and it sits at the top. Nielsen Norman Group's 2006 eyetracking study found participants fully read 19% of the newsletters they opened, gave an opened one 51 seconds on average, and 67% of them recorded no eye fixations at all inside the newsletter's introduction, even though those introductions averaged about three lines. NN/g's 2010 round turns that into the rule to follow: lead with the content the reader values, because they rarely read far past it.

That same round also found readers arrive in different modes, some with a minute and some with ten, and advised committing to a brief mail or a leisurely one rather than a compromise that serves neither. That is the reason for the two shapes below.

Word count targets are the weakest part of the published advice. The figures in circulation disagree with each other, trace back to secondary citations rather than to studies, and the publishers printing them say scannability matters more than the count. So treat length as a consequence of what has to fit, not as a target to hit.

Decide the email's job first

Before you cut a single sentence, answer three questions. If the brief does not settle them, ask rather than assuming.

• What is the one action you want? Read the post, book the call, reply, upgrade, show up. One, not three. A mail that asks for three things has not decided what it is for, and it makes the reader do that work in the seconds they have given you.
• What does this reader already know? A list of existing customers and a list of cold signups need different first lines, and the same email cannot serve both.
• What happens if they do nothing? If the honest answer is nothing, this may not need to be an email, and saying so is more useful than sending it.

The two shapes

Most adaptations are one of these. Pick deliberately, because mixing them produces an email that is too long to read and too thin to be useful.

The pointer. The email exists to get the click. Give the reader the single most interesting idea from the piece, enough context to know why it matters to them, and the link. Keep it short enough that the idea and the link are both there before any scrolling. This is the right shape for a blog post, a guide, or anything long: the piece is the destination, so do not reproduce it.

The whole thing. The email is the deliverable and there is nothing to click through to. An announcement, a short essay, a set of release notes, a personal note. It can run longer, but every paragraph still has to earn its place, and it still ends with one action.

The mistake to avoid is the third shape that happens by accident: two thirds of a blog post pasted into an email, ending in "read the rest". You have spent the reader's attention on the part you included and you are still asking them to leave to get the rest, so neither half of the mail is doing its job.

What to cut

Cutting for email is not proportional trimming. Whole categories go.

• Setup, background, and the history of the problem. This is the part the eyetracking work found readers skipping outright, so it is the first thing to lose. The page needed to establish relevance; the email establishes it in the first line or loses the reader anyway.
• Anything hedged, caveated, or qualified at length. Nuance survives on a page and dies in a preview pane. If a claim needs three sentences of qualification, either state it plainly and link to the qualification, or cut it.
• Supporting arguments after the first. A page can make a case three ways; an email makes it once.
• Section headings that were navigational. The email is short enough not to need a map.
• Secondary calls to action. Move them to the page, or drop them.

What survives: the specific claim, the number or example that makes it concrete, the reason this reader should care, and the action.

What to add

Adaptation is not only subtraction. An email needs things a page does not.

• A reason this arrived now. "Because you signed up for X" or "you asked about Y last month" or simply what changed. Unexplained mail reads as bulk.
• Subject line and preview text, written as a pair. See email-style for how they work together.
• The plain text version.
• A sign-off from a person rather than from a department, where the brand allows it.

Keep the source honest

You are editing someone else's work, usually the content marketer's, and they made choices you cannot see from the copy alone.

• Do not harden a hedged claim while compressing it. "Early results suggest a 20% reduction" becoming "cuts costs 20%" is the single easiest error to make in this pass, and it is the one that causes real problems.
• Do not invent specifics to make a sentence tighter. A number that was not in the source does not go in the email.
• When you cut something substantial, changed the emphasis, or dropped a caveat on purpose, say so in your handback. The person who wrote it should get the chance to disagree.

References

• references/patterns.md: worked shapes for the recurring email types, including the newsletter, the announcement, the nurture sequence, and the re-engagement mail, with what each one gets wrong most often.

Layers on top of

email-style carries the voice and the format limits, and writing-quality carries the word-level rules. This skill only covers the decisions about structure and scope.

Sources

• Nielsen Norman Group, "Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion", June 11 2006, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/email-newsletters-inbox-congestion/ . Eyetracking plus field study, 42 participants and 117 newsletters. Source for 19% fully read, 35% skimmed or glanced at only part, 51 seconds average on an opened newsletter, and 67% of participants with zero fixations in the introduction.
• Nielsen Norman Group, "E-Mail Newsletters: Increasing Usability", November 28 2010, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/e-mail-newsletters-usability/ . Five rounds of research, 270 newsletters across 124 participants. Source for leading with high-value content because readers rarely go further, and for committing to a brief or a leisurely message rather than a compromise.
• The share of a newsletter that gets read varies a lot between NN/g's rounds: 23% read thoroughly in 2002, 11% in the 2004 diary study (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/targeted-email-newsletters/), 19% in the 2006 eyetracking study. Read these as "most of it goes unread" rather than as a stable figure.
• Depth-of-attention research on web pages points the same way but is not email: NN/g's 2018 eyetracking analysis (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/scrolling-and-attention/, 120 participants, over 130,000 fixations) found 57% of viewing time above the fold and 74% within the first two screenfuls, down from 80% above the fold in its 2010 measurement. Do not quote these numbers as email findings.
• Deliberately not used: the widely repeated claim that a single call to action produces 371% more clicks and 1617% more sales. Campaign Monitor's page carrying it links to a WordStream stats roundup rather than to a study, and no primary source, sample size, or date is findable. The one-action rule above is editorial judgment, not that number.
• No verifiable primary source exists for an ideal email word count either. The most quoted band, 50 to 125 words, appears on Campaign Monitor (February 27 2020, https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/email-length-best-practices-for-email-marketers-and-email-newbies/) sourced to a magazine article rather than to research, and the same page contradicts itself on the range and concludes that scannability matters more than length.