The most irritating myth about copywriting (in emails or otherwise) is the unfounded belief that short copy is always superior to long copy.
This is, of course, based on a piece of rhetoric that ain’t even entirely true despite how much marketers and normies want to believe it.
The rhetoric?
That humanity has devolved in the last 20 or so years and we are now as stoopid (in terms of attention spans) as goldfish.
O, how hath we fallen?
Of course, this flies in the face of what your own eyeballs can see: 3-hour long podcasts, for example, have never been more popular.
How is it that our attention spans are as short as a goldfish’s, and yet, Joe Rogan has had the most popular podcast in the world over the past 10 years?
Something’s fishy here.
(Ha! See what I did there?)
Now, it’s true that we have varying attention spans based on the type of content:
Listening to a three-hour podcast is far easier than reading for three straight hours.
Or is it?
Yesterday, I read Children of Dune (mayhap the best book in the entire series) by Frank Herbert for, well, most of the day. I found it hard to put the book down. And when I did set it down throughout the day to do chores, I couldn’t wait to dive back in.
I spent several hours reading yesterday—and each sentence only sucked me in deeper into the world he painted. Something I don’t think any goldfish would actually do. But to be fair, I know a few people who gave up on Dune in the first book (Children of Dune is the third, and the second book wasn’t easy to get through).
It’s almost as if people’s attention spans vary based on the type of content they’re consuming.
And that writing in an entertaining and informative way keeps them suckered in.
(Conversely, it’s also like gurus who perpetuate the “short copy” myth have a vested interest in making things sound easier than they are…)
But this email ain’t so much about the battle of short copy vs long copy.
Instead, I want to zoom out a bit and discuss the point of copy itself.
The point of copy isn’t to bend to the will of your audience’s attention spans.
Or be so inoffensive that your audience bores itself to sleep.
No, the point of copy is to build trust and rapport in order to make a sale.
Copy, at its most fundamental level, is salesmanship in print.
But instead of being a 1-to-1 conversation, copy allows you to have a 1-to-many conversation.
Well, in any sales environment, the more trust and rapport you build up, the better your chances of closing the deal.
And that’s why the short copy is always better myth is a myth.
Yes, there are certain situations where short copy is, in fact, better. But this comes at the expense of your long-term goal, which is getting your audience to spend as much time with you as possible.
The more time they spend with you, the more they can feel like they trust you.
And short copy, as counterintuitive as it may sound, requires you to send hundreds if not thousands of more emails for your audience to hit this vague, yet crucial “time spent with you” metric.
Long copy offers a shortcut to get there. But you actually have to be entertaining, engaging, funny, witty, informative, and, well, I could keep piling on the adjectives here but that’s as good as a starting point as any.
Moral of the story?
Short copy can be better, but know that it comes with certain risks—especially for building trust and rapport, which just-so-happens to be the most important thing in email marketing.
Need help writing longer copy without boring your audience to death?
Hit reply, and let’s chat.
John
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