The Email Wars

Have you ever noticed the power of lists for driving readership of newsletters, email or any PR online? We as marketers long for more bullet points and ways that we can quickly take away some knowledge in small bite sized chunks. But I have also noticed that smaller lists have a greater impact? 

Why, well I think that it is simple… smaller lists address the problem and the solution while longer lists seem to just throw things up in the air for you to choose the solution. Here are some examples:

3 Ways to Solve Your Issue

100 Things You Can do to Combat Your Problem

When you say here are the 3-5 things in a short list, it seems that you know how to fix what is wrong, while when you have a list of 20-100 things you are just giving ideas to problem solving. 

Let’s turn this over to email marketing with some examples:

The 5 Ways to Address Deliverability - Simple enough a list of 5 things that you can do to help yourself immediately. 

The 25 Most Important Things You Can Do To Get to the Inbox - With a list this long is shows a myriad of solutions to a problem that you can digest, but you then need to narrow down what might work for you. 

Now let’s take that to a retail email campaign:

Get the 3 Shoes That You Need for Summer Vs. The Top 20 Shoes To Make a Summer Outfit Rock

If there are really only 3 types of shoes that you need Vs. 20 shoes brands that you COULD buy it clearly helps someone think narrower and can drive more sales. When presented with too many choices we have a harder time deciding. If you are the expert you should be able to present what WE need and help us make the choice. 

Lists are powerful in business to business and business to consumer email marketing. But telling not showing with less choices will take people down the conversion funnel faster and more directly than sending people to make a choice in a sea of options. 

Just my two cents (not 10 cents).