I write this a few days before Thanksgiving and the world’s biggest holiday for ecom, retail, and business in general: Black Friday.
I’ll leave my Black Friday cynicism out of this one, but it may become content for another day.
Anyway…
One of the trends I’ve already started seeing (since, y’know, Black Friday has extended to mean the entire month of November for most online brands) is using short-as-sin copy for Black Friday emails.
Nothing inherently “wrong” with this. In fact, if you did your job with pre-selling the Black Friday promo, a couple of strategically placed short-as-sin emails might just be your most profitable emails.
But this ignores a major psychological problem with short-as-sin copy.
Worse, it dupes otherwise smart marketers and brands into thinking that the main takeaway from Black Friday is that short-as-sin copy is obviously superior to long-form copy and content.
This, cully, is a big fat mistake. As I’ll explain in a sec.
But first:
I mention “content” here for a specific reason because this lesson may be more applicable to the wider world of content creation in general than it is to copywriting.
Short form content is all the rage since TikTok revived Vine. Now, every major social media platform “borrows” TikTok’s USP. And nothing is more popular on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook than short form content.
But Joe Rogan didn’t become the #1 podcaster in the world because of short form content. He didn't get to have mayhap the single most important election interview in history (something that methinks played a major role in Trump’s dominating win) because of his short form clips.
Joe accomplished these unbelievable feats because he leveraged a psychological principle that can easily be applied to your copy, your emails, your content, and anything else you create to promote your business.
What’s this psychological principle?
People need to consume an absolute metric fvckton of your content before they know, they like, and they trust you.
Just how many hours of content do they need to consume?
Well, it’s different depending on which guru you tune into. Guys like Tai Lopez say this number is 13 hours. Other gurus say it’s 11 hours. And then Google (which might be the origin of this entire idea, but I don’t know for sure because Google has had a long and ugly fall from the top thanks to woke policies and political incorrectness and AI and a bunch of other reasons) says this number is 7 hours.
Regardless of the specifics, the point is simple:
People need much more content from you than you think in order to know, like, and trust you. And they don’t buy until they know, like, and trust you. (Obviously there are a few exceptions here or things you can do to minimize this “time-to-buy” metric like nail their pain points, nail your USP, nail your market research, yada yada yada.)
And short-form content just doesn’t help you reach the necessary hours of content consumed in an efficient manner.
For example:
I’d guess most “short” emails are between 250 and 500 words. It takes a minute and 51 seconds to read 250 words; and 3 minutes and 42 seconds to read 500 words.
Let’s do some quick maths:
3 minutes and 42 seconds translates to 222 seconds. Do you know how many seconds you need for 13 hours of content? That number becomes 46,800 seconds.
So, let’s divide 46,800 by 222:
You’d need to write over 200 emails at 500 words to reach 13 hours of content. That means, you’d have to spend more than half a year doing a daily email to just reach the table where they might consider your brand or product or service.
Of course, it’s terribly unlikely that a daily email where you only write 500 words will keep people’s interest. Even TikTok’s best can’t keep zoomer’s attention for that long.
500 words is also far too short to merge information, education, and entertainment—and this is the secret sauce of email copy that allows your audience to create new connections in their brain (and once they do this, their brain will never shrink back to its original size) and can make sales happen faster because it fast tracks the KLT (know, like, trust) factor that’s a secret weapon of long form copy.
It’s also much more efficient:
If we doubled the 500 word emails to 1000 word emails, then, well, it’ll take you…
Half of the time to embed yourself in your customers’ psyches!
Not to mention, the other benefits you get from long form copy like:
* Increased revenue for each email you send
* Improved brand loyalty to everyone who opens and reads it
* Fast tracking the KLT factor by mixing content with promotion
* Unlocking a better understanding of what “rubs” your audience
And a buncha other reasons that I don’t feel like explaining here.
Moral of the story?
Don’t let Black Friday brainfvck your entire email strategy. Even if short copy outperforms long copy, that doesn’t mean short copy is better. It’s likely the opposite. (And the best strategies use a mix of both to keep their audience on their metaphorical toes, leaning in every time they see an email from you magically appear in their inbox.)
Anywho:
Need help maximizing your email revenue after Black Friday?
Hit reply, and let’s chat.
John
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