How to write a marketing email people actually read
Structure, length, voice and formatting for email that earns a click — plus the accessibility and legal basics that stop it being deleted.
Writing · 4 min read · updated
Decide the one thing first
Before writing a word, finish this sentence: after reading this, I want one person to do one specific thing. If you cannot finish it, the email is not ready to be written — and no amount of drafting will rescue it.
Emails that try to do three things do none of them. If you have three things to say, you have three emails, or a newsletter with an honest table of contents.
The shape that works
- Subject. A specific promise, front-loaded, 35–50 characters. See the subject-line guide for the words that help and hurt.
- Preheader. The completion of the subject, set deliberately — never left to the client's guess.
- First line. Deliver on the promise immediately. “Hope you're doing well” spends the most valuable line in the message saying nothing. Start where a friend would start.
- The middle. One idea per paragraph, two or three sentences each. Give one concrete piece of proof — a number, a name, a screenshot — rather than three adjectives.
- The call to action. A button that names the outcome, high in the message, repeated once at the end.
- The PS. One of the most-read lines in any email, because skimmers land there. Use it to restate the action or add the detail that tips the decision.
Length: write to the click, not to the read
For a single call to action, 50–150 words is usually plenty. The email is not the pitch; it is the reason to go where the pitch lives. Newsletters can run longer because the reading is the point — but they still need one idea per section and an obvious way to stop.
The reliable edit: write the draft, then cut a fifth of it. The fifth that goes is almost always throat-clearing at the start and hedging at the end.
Voice
- Second person, present tense. “You can move a domain in about ten minutes”, not “domains can be migrated by users”.
- Concrete nouns, few adverbs. “Cuts setup from a day to ten minutes” says more than “dramatically simplifies onboarding”, and it can be checked.
- One idea per sentence. Long sentences read fine on a laptop and badly on a phone in a queue, which is where your email is.
- Read it aloud. If you run out of breath or feel embarrassed, rewrite that line. This single habit fixes more email copy than any framework.
Formatting for people who skim
Assume the reader scans the message in about three seconds before deciding. Short paragraphs, generous spacing, and a bolded phrase where the meaning concentrates — sparingly, because bolding half the email bolds nothing.
Build it as text first: a single column around 600px wide, real HTML text rather than words baked into pictures, a sensible image-to-text balance, and alt text on every image so the message still makes sense when they do not load. Always ship a plain-text alternative part — some people read it, and its absence is a small negative signal to filters.
Accessible by default
Roughly one reader in five uses some assistive setting, from a screen reader to simply enlarged type. Semantic headings, meaningful alt text, link text that means something out of context, adequate colour contrast, and a stated language attribute cover most of it.
This is not a separate accessibility pass. Every item on that list also makes the email clearer for everybody else and more legible to a spam filter, which reads your HTML much the way a screen reader does.
The non-negotiables
- An honest From and Subject. Deceptive headers and misleading subject lines are the part of anti-spam law with actual teeth in most jurisdictions — and they are also the fastest way to train an audience to ignore you.
- A working one-click unsubscribe. One click, no login, honoured within two days. Making it hard converts unsubscribes into spam complaints, which cost far more.
- A postal address and a clear identity. Required in most commercial-email regimes, and a trust signal in its own right.
- A defensible basis for having the address. Consent rules differ by jurisdiction and this is not legal advice — but if you cannot say where an address came from, that is a problem regardless of which rules apply to you.
The last pass before you send
- Read it aloud, then cut a fifth.
- Click every link in a real client, including the unsubscribe.
- Check every merge tag has a fallback value.
- Send a seed test to Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail.
- Look at it on a phone, in dark mode.
- Confirm the segment is the one you meant.
Common questions
How long should a marketing email be?
For a single call to action, 50–150 words. The job of the email is to earn the click, not to make the whole argument.
Should I use emoji in email?
Sparingly, and never as the carrier of meaning — rendering varies and screen readers announce them by name. One at the front of a subject line is fine if it fits your voice; three is noise.
Plain text or HTML?
Send both parts. Design the HTML to look almost like plain text — text-heavy, one column, few images — which reads better on phones and tends to place better too.
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