Writing email copy that gets read, not skimmed

The email you spent an afternoon on is being read on a phone, one-handed, between two other things, by somebody who has already decided to give it about two seconds before moving on. They are not reading sentences yet. They are looking at the shape of the message — how long it is, whether it is broken up, whether there is an obvious thing to do — and deciding from that whether to read any words at all.

This is uncomfortable but useful, because it separates two jobs that are usually confused. The first job of email copy is to survive a scan. The second is to be good writing. A beautifully written email that looks like a wall of text fails at the first job and the second never gets assessed.

It also explains why advice about email copy sounds so blunt compared with advice about other writing. Short paragraphs, one idea, obvious action: these are not stylistic preferences or a claim that readers are unintelligent. They are accommodations to the two seconds in which the decision is actually made.

The most common structural fault is not length. It is an email that asks for three things: read this article, book a slot, and also follow us on Instagram. Each additional request reduces the chance of any of them happening, because the reader now has to choose, and the cheapest choice available is to close the message.

The fix is to rank the asks and keep the first one. The others go in a later email or nowhere. This is harder than it sounds, because the second and third requests usually exist for internal reasons — somebody asked for the Instagram link, the newsletter has always had a section — rather than because a reader wanted them.

A useful test before writing: finish the sentence 'I want the reader to ______.' If it needs an 'and', the email is two emails. Businesses that send infrequently feel the most pressure here, because each send seems too rare to waste on one thing. That pressure is the mechanism by which infrequent senders produce their least effective mail.

Most drafts begin with warm-up. A greeting, a note about the season, a sentence explaining that you are excited to share something. All of it occupies the space where the reader is deciding whether to continue.

Put the news first, in the first line, in plain words. If the class schedule has changed, the first line says the class schedule has changed. Context, background and pleasantries can follow for the readers who continue, and the readers who do not continue have still received the point.

The editing test is mechanical and reliable: delete the first paragraph and read what remains. Most of the time nothing is lost, which means the paragraph was doing no work. Occasionally the second paragraph then makes no sense, which tells you the first contained something essential that was buried in a sentence of throat-clearing — extract it and write it as the opening line.

This is also what makes the preview text work. The preheader shows the beginning of your message in the inbox, so an email that opens with substance advertises itself and one that opens with 'Hope you are doing well' advertises nothing.

Paragraphs of one to three sentences. On a phone, a paragraph that runs to six lines of prose reads as a block, and a block is what the eye skips.

Subheadings should be readable on their own. If somebody reads only your subheads, they should come away with the substance of the email. That is a real constraint and it changes how they are written: 'What changed' is a label, while 'Evening classes move to 7pm from Monday' is a summary. The second one does the work even for a reader who never reads the paragraph under it.

Use bold on the specific words that carry information — the date, the price, the deadline — rather than on whole sentences, which produces emphasis that cancels itself out. Use bullets only for genuinely parallel items; a bulleted list of unrelated sentences is a paragraph with the connective tissue removed, which makes it harder to follow rather than easier.

Leave white space. It is not wasted; it is what makes the structure visible at a glance, which is the only level at which most readers will engage with it.

One primary action, stated as a specific thing rather than a generic instruction. 'Book Tuesday's class' tells the reader what will happen. 'Click here' and 'Learn more' tell them nothing, and the reader who cannot predict the destination is more likely to do nothing.

Place it where a scanner will find it — after the reason to act, not buried in the fourth paragraph — and repeat it once at the end for readers who did read the whole thing. Two placements of the same action is repetition that helps. Two different actions is the fault described earlier.

One technical point that is frequently missed: a button built as a styled image, or as a background colour some clients strip, can disappear entirely. Build buttons from HTML and inline styles rather than as images, and make sure the surrounding text also contains a plain link, so the action survives a client that renders your styling badly or blocks images.

Write the link text so it makes sense read out of context, because screen readers can present links as a list detached from the surrounding sentence.

Send the draft to yourself and read it on a phone. Not in the platform's desktop preview — on the device where it will be read. Most structural problems are obvious within seconds there and invisible in a preview pane.

Then run four cuts. Delete the first paragraph and check whether anything was lost. Remove hedges and intensifiers: 'we are really excited to be able to finally offer' becomes 'we now offer'. Cut any sentence that exists to introduce the next one. And cut any second call to action.

Read it aloud. Anything you stumble over is a sentence the reader will stumble over silently, and email prose that sounds like a person is read further than prose that sounds like an announcement.

Finally check the mechanics that are easy to forget and visible to everybody: the preheader text, that every link goes where it should, that any merge field has a sensible fallback, and that the message still makes sense with images blocked. Then ask whether the single action is obvious in the first two seconds — because that is the standard the reader will actually apply.