by: AskPat 772 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 772 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.
Now here is today's question from Rachel.
Rachel: Hi Pat, Rachel here. Thanks so much for all of your invaluable information. I dropped into your PDF—not sure what it is technically—anyway, your top five email tools recommended are wonderful, really helpful. I'm also looking for something perhaps you also have obviously about emails which is anything that's going to limit the length of the line so that people don't die of boredom and just tune out. What is the ideal line length for emails? Anything you can provide on that would be absolutely brilliant. Thank you, bye bye.
Pat Flynn: Hey Rachel, thank you so much for the questions day. That email thing that you were talking about actually that is something that people can find in episode 115 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. That's where I interviewed my assistant, Jessica, who is amazing. She helped come on board to tackle emails and in that PDF file that Rachel is talking about, I talk about some of the tools that I use for email conquering.
You can find that at www.SmartPassiveIncome.com/session115, you can download that there. But Rachel, ideal word count I guess, word count would be what I would recommend in terms of what you should shoot for and the word count I would recommend is whatever you need and nothing more. What I mean by that is, I wouldn't say try to shoot for a specific number. Or try not to go over a specific number or go under a specific number.
And the reason for that is because I don't like saying that because sometimes. . . the example I like to use in the analogy is with my podcast. I had initially said, in episode one that most of my episodes were going to shoot for 26 minutes in length because my thinking was that's the amount of time people spend watching television shows, that's their attention span.
After the first interview I just could not cut it off at 26 minutes when I was interviewing because it was just so good. I would be doing my audience a disservice if I was going to cut it off at 26 minutes. Some interviews go to around 26 minutes because that's what that guest—not that it's bad it's just that, we got to the end at that point.
Another episodes they go to 130. Not 130, one hour and half and that's great. People have said amazing things about those as well. I wouldn't shoot for a specific word count or length. I would shoot for exactly what you need to write in order to get the point across and sometimes that's gonna be not very many words. Other times it's going to be a significant amount of words.
My emails. They range anywhere between 250 words, sometimes really short like that. Typically the shorter ones have some sort of call to action, where they click on a link or something, or reply. But other times I'm sharing tips or something and I just cannot shorten it to 250 words, or 500 words or even 1,000 words.
Some of my emails are 2,000 words and you might be thinking Rachel, “Wow! That's too many words, and people are going to be bored.” If they're bored then I'm writing too much or if they're bored I'm not writing about something that they're interested in. Sometimes even in those longer emails people say “Oh man, I wish there was more because this is good stuff.”
The point of all this is I would shoot for quality and quality is not directly tied to quantity when it comes to emails. In the blogging world, the blog posts, there's a little bit more of a correlation there between length and quality, especially according to Google, for those of you who are interested in search engine optimization.
But remember these are emails and people are very strict with what they do with their time, so if they give you the honor of having them open your email, what you want to is make sure that you honor them by making the content great. Sometimes that means fewer words, sometimes that means longer words and that's my stance. Rachel, thank you so much for the question, I really appreciate it. This was a fantastic one.
I want to share with you an AskPat t-shirt because we send an AskPat t-shirt for everybody who gets their question featured here on the show. You'll hear from my assistant Jessica in the next month or so and she'll collect your information so we can send that over to you free of charge. If you all want to check out to see what the AskPat shirt looks like and also head to a page where you can actually ask a question, you can find that all at www.AskPat.com, that's where you go. Ask your questions please!
Finally, as always, I love to end it with a quote and today's quote comes from Andre Gide: “One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose site of the shore for a very long time.” This is very true. All right guys, I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.
