Research from a pair of Harvard professors shows people are dramatically more likely to respond to shorter emails.
BY JESSICA STILLMAN for Inc.
Sometimes all that stands between an entrepreneur and business success is getting the right person to read your email. Which is why tips and tricks to make your emails more compelling and increase your response rates are so valuable. There are plenty of good ones out there, but few are as easy to implement as one recently highlighted by a pair of Harvard researchers in their new book.
Half as many words leads to twice as many reads.
An excerpt of Writing for Busy Readers by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink recently appeared in the online magazine Behavioral Scientist. It highlights research from the Harvard researchers that should change how you write emails forever.
The study design was simple. The researchers sent one of two emails to around 7,000 school board members asking them to complete a short research survey. One version was 127 words and the other just 49. How did responses to the two messages differ?
“The Concise email yielded nearly twice as many survey responses as the Wordy email–a 4.8 percent response rate instead of 2.7 percent,” the pair report.
Why? “Some readers likely looked at the length of the Wordy email and chose not to engage with it at all. Others likely didn’t read all the way through it and missed the request at the end. In addition, some readers may have used the length of the email as a signal of how long it would take to complete the survey and decided to pass on the request (which they presumed would be taxing),” they explain.
The harder it is to read your email, in other words, the harder many people will perceive the ask to be. Which is why many will delay responding or ignore it entirely.
Include a concise takeaway.
In the spirit of this research, I will be concise in underlying the takeaway here: write shorter emails. Back in ninth grade, you might have gotten a higher grade by inflating word counts, but in the professional world this research — and a bunch of other studies — show that brevity is rewarded.
Writing less can actually require more discipline and skill than writing more. But as these authors conclude, it’s generally worth the effort.
“Busy readers are more likely to make time to engage with short, well-structured, skimmable messages. And if they do engage, they are then more likely to take away the most critical information. Spending a little more time up front to be concise saves readers and writers time by reducing follow-ups, misunderstandings, and requests left unfulfilled,” they insist.
So next time you really want an email to get read and responded to, I challenge you to figure out how to slash the word count.
