White space in emails

I’m going take a quick break from our discussion on copywriting today to answer a question from a client regarding my “white space never sold a thing” tip last week. Here’s the post at my blog to review.

Here’s the question from Steve Hyslop of Chuck's Waterfront Grill & The Endless Summer bar-café:

If white space never sold a thing, why is there all the white space at the right of the e-mail below? As I'm sure you know, others do this too, although interestingly, some do not. I would assume it increases readership. Just wondering. Happy Holidays to you and yours. Others may find this of interest too.

Thanks for the great question, and good job not taking something at face value, but questioning it. Everybody should be doing that with everything they come across (even my posts). Here’s my response to Steve today:

Great question and I’ll probably bring it up this week in my tip. Email is a little different. In the most recent studies I’ve read, readership is better when lines are about 55-65 characters long. I’ve heard this form a couple other internet marketing guys I trust, so I take it at their word.

The reason is everybody’s monitor has different settings like width, fonts etc. The 55-65 characters virtually guarantee that your lines will ‘break’ where you want them to.

Plus, the shorter lines make the text/copy seem shorter. You’ll notice I usually on use 1-3 sentence paragraphs as well. In general, people want quick and short emails, and this gives that appearance.

So I hope I didn’t disappoint you now that the cats out of the bag and you know my dirty little e-mail secrets. But, I do think it’s important, and that’s why I was willing to share this all with you. We’ll pick back up later this week with our copywriting topic. See you then!