Short Emails, Higher Click Rates

There's a counterintuitive thing that happens when you make your emails shorter. The click rate goes up.

Not because you're being clever about your subject line or your call to action. Because you've stopped giving people every reason to stay in the email instead of going somewhere else.

This came up on a Q&A call where a member was frustrated that her open rates were strong but her click-through was low. She was writing detailed emails packed with value, tips, context, everything she'd want to know if she were the reader. And people were opening, reading, and staying right there in the inbox.

The fix wasn't better copy. It was less of it.

The actual strategy

Write the first paragraph of a story or a single useful idea in the email. Then stop. Put the rest on a blog post and link to it.

The email earns the click by creating genuine curiosity about how the story ends or how the idea develops, not by giving away everything upfront and hoping the reader finds the link anyway.

The person who clicks through is signaling something: they actually want more from you. That's a different reader than the one who scanned your email and closed it. And that signal — who clicks on which topics — is data you can use to understand your list better over time.

How AI fits into this

The blog posts that back up those short emails are where AI becomes a practical tool. I'm using AI to draft the longer-form content from my coaching call transcripts. A teaching moment that would have been a full-length email becomes a post. The email becomes a short teaser that links to it.

The result is that I'm creating less per channel while producing more across channels. The call generates the material. AI drafts the post. The email is short on purpose, and the link does the work.

What this does to your list over time

A list trained to receive short, useful emails that link out develops a different reading habit than a list that gets everything delivered in the email. Over time, your click rate becomes a signal about which topics your audience actually wants to go deeper on, not just which subject lines got them to open.

That's useful data if you ever want to know what your next product, course, or offer should focus on.

The mechanics of email strategy aren't complicated. But the counterintuitive move — deliberately leaving things shorter than you're tempted to make them — is one that most people resist until they see it work.

What would happen to your email click rate if you cut your next email in half and linked the rest to a post?