How to Break One Long Email Into a Series of Emails

A common question I get from business owners is, “What do I do when I have too much to say in one email?”

As someone who tends to ramble on in emails, I feel your pain.

It’s easy to do, especially when you’re in a rush and don’t want to take the time to edit what you’ve written to be more concise. (I wouldn’t know anything about that…)

We’re all busy, doing the things we need to do to run our businesses. Writing emails is a necessary part of those things, but it doesn’t have to take up ALL your time.

So, what do you do when you write one of those ridiculously long-winded emails and don’t want to delete anything you wrote?

Simple. Make it into a series of emails.

“Ack! My Email is Too Long!”

As mentioned earlier, I am guilty of uttering this phrase on a regular basis.

When I originally studied copywriting, I learned to write 20-page long sales letters. Yes, the ones you still occasionally get as junk mail. I’m used to being able to go on and on about a particular point and give as much information as possible.

Email doesn’t work that way.

You can write long emails. They work great when you’re running a launch or having a big sale. However, your subscribers may not want to read a huge, long email every week, or every day.

Thus, brevity is the soul of wit and it’s smarter to keep your emails short and to the point.

Which brings us back to, what do you do when you write one of those ridiculously long-winded emails and don’t want to delete anything you wrote.

When you break that long-winded email up into a series of emails, you’re doing yourself two favors:

You’re saving yourself time by not doing a thorough edit to reduce your word count. (Please always, always do a spell check and read through to make sure your email makes sense and doesn’t contain errors.)
By breaking up one long email into a few shorter ones, you’re getting more emails written in advance.

This happened to one of my participants in this summer’s Email Batching Bootcamp. She had several great ideas she was trying to cram into one email, and it was getting really long. I recommended that she break it up into several emails and send them as a series.

She let out a huge sigh of relief, because she wanted to get all this info to her subscribers, but it was quickly becoming overwhelming for her. It would have been overwhelming for her readers too.

A Bit of Clarification

I want to take a moment to define a series of emails vs. other email series. (Yes, that is a very confusing sentence. That’s why I want to make things clear.)

When you hear “email series,” you probably think of an email welcome sequence. That’s the email series you send right after someone opts in to get your lead magnet, which puts them on your email list.

You may also think of your email nurture sequence, which are the emails you send your subscribers on a regular basis to “nurture” them into becoming paying customers. You’re on the ball if you went that direction. Your series of emails can be part of your email nurture sequence. They are not the entire thing, which is why I’m giving you this specific definition:

A series of emails is a continuous story or topic across more than one nurture email.

I hope that makes it clear as mud for you.

I would break up long emails into a series of emails a lot when I was writing every weekday.

If I had a large topic I could divide into sections, I would do a section each day that week. I could go back and repurpose it later by fleshing it out a bit and publishing it as a blog post. Sometimes I didn’t need to do much more than take out the intro and farewell in each email.

By the way, this blog post came from a series of emails I wrote over the last 2 weeks. More about that later.

If you’re staring at an unfinished email that is more than 600 words long, I recommend that you keep going and write until you’re finished with whatever it is you need to say. Go ahead, let it all out! You’ll find it quite freeing.

Then, go through the email and find natural breakpoints where you can insert a short intro and farewell paragraph. Think of these as transitions from one email to the next.

A wooden bridge leading off into the distance.

Making a Smooth Transition in Your Series of Emails

To properly illustrate this for you, I’ve included the full text of the second email in this series. Keep reading, it will all make sense.

Here’s where the email starts…

We’re talking about writing a series of emails again. I started this email series on writing a series of emails on Tuesday. If you missed that one, I recommend going back and reading after you finish this one. It will all make sense.

As I mentioned yesterday, writing a series of emails is an easy way to stretch out an idea when you have a lot to say about it.

The art is in the transitions.

When you originally wrote your email, you probably looked at it and said, “That’s way too long for an email.” Then you gave a huge, disgruntled sigh and looked for sections you could cut.

Instead of being forced to truncate your wonderful idea, you just need to break it up into sections.

Once you’ve done that, your next task is to write transitions from one section to the next.

The first section will only need a farewell transition. The last section will only need an intro transition. Every section in between will need one of each.

The idea with these transitions is to be the connecting wires between a bunch of lightbulbs. Each wire leads your subscriber to their next “A-ha!” moment when the lightbulb turns on.

If you’ve ever listened to old episodic radio shows, you’ve heard great examples of this.

The narrator reminds the audience of what happened in the last episode at the beginning.

“When we last left our intrepid heroes, they were dangling from a cliff, high above the Colorado River, desperately clinging to the rocks to keep from plummeting to their deaths below…” and then the dialogue would start.

At the end of the episode, the narrator would forecast the next installment.

“Will our heroes manage to rescue the rancher’s daughter, round up the stray cattle and save themselves? Will the rancher’s daughter be willing to return home to her family or will she choose to live a life of reckless abandon with her newly formed band of lady outlaws?

“And what about Naomi?

“Tune in next week to find out on (Insert name of show here.)”

You need to do something similar, but perhaps not quite so dramatic, with your email intro and farewell transitions.

Your intro transition for each email would look something like:

“Yesterday, I talked about how X and Y would cause Z. Today I want to clarify…”

The farewell would tease the next day’s email, should look something like this:

“Okay, I’ve gone on long enough for today. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about…”

If you don’t send daily emails, substitute whatever day you’ll send your next email.

By the way, I don’t recommend doing a series of emails if you send less often than once a week. That’s a long time to ask someone to remember what you previously wrote, even with a dramatic reminder intro.

I do recommend trying this at least once, to see how your subscribers react. I tend get a lot of replies when I finish a series. I get good open rates too.

If you’re feeling a bit confused by all of this and wondering how to write an intro and farewell paragraph without sounding like a cheesy 1930s radio announcer, finish reading this email. Then go back and read it again, paying specific attention to the beginning and the end. I am presenting a perfect example of how to make it all work smoothly.

Now that you know how to introduce and wrap up each section of your email series, you may wonder how you go about dividing your original email into sections, so you can add those pieces to each one.

(Cue dramatic announcer voice:) Tune in next week, when I reveal the secret to isolating each small idea within your overall big idea, so you can turn that into its own, unique, and perfect email in your series.

…Here’s where the email ends for the purposes of this section.

And then I wrap up the email with a call to action. More on that later.

Okay, go back and read that section again. Really. It’ll help.

Once you’ve done that, you can continue on to…

Finding the Natural Breaks in Your Email

Your next question is, “How do I divide this really long email into shorter ones, so it still makes sense?”

Easy. Find the natural breakpoints.

“Thanks, Tanya.”

“What the heck does that mean?”

Let’s say you sat down at your computer and your fingers magically spewed forth 1500 to 2000 words about your chosen topic.

That’s a pretty standard length for a blog post. It’s typically way too long for an email.

Your really long email should have a large, overarching idea. That’s your email topic.

Within that large idea, you probably touch on several small ideas, using the large one to tie everything together.

Those smaller ideas are your dividing points for each shorter email in your series.

Once you’ve isolated those smaller ideas and shored them up so they can stand on their own. Then, you add the intro and farewell transitions, as per last Thursday’s email. Voila, you’ve got something almost ready to send.

I say almost because you’re missing a couple of pieces.

The first piece is your subject line.

When I sent this series of emails, I used brackets with the series name in the subject line to remind my subscribers that this is a series. Mine was [Email Series on Series].

That reminder, along with a catchy phrase, should do the trick. FYI, the “catchy phrases” I used in my emails are some of the H2 subheads in this blog post.

The second piece is your call to action, or CTA.

Asking Your Subscribers to Say “Yes”

As I’ve mentioned many times in previous blog posts, the point of your nurture emails is to train your subscribers to act when they open your emails. Any CTA, even a “soft” one asking them to take a small step, works.

Doing so has two purposes:

It trains your subscribers to “act” or do something when they read your emails.
It gives you the opportunity to make a sale.

I’m gonna be blunt here. The point of having an email list is to be able to make money.

As much as we’d all love to be altruistic and give as much as possible, at some point, it comes down to our bottom lines.

You need to make a living. The people who are on your email list are interested in whatever it is you do to make a living. Somewhere in the process, these two interests must meet and result in a sale.

Will every single person on your list buy when you add a call to action?

No. Of course not. They’re not all at that stage of their buyer’s journey.

But, adding a call to action in your emails reminds them they have the opportunity to buy, when they’re ready.

The point of putting some sort of call to action into each email is to get your subscribers used to seeing it there and, ideally, clicking on it.

For example, when I wrote this series of emails, I used the waitlist for my next Email Batching Bootcamp as my call to action. It doesn’t cost my subscribers anything to join the waitlist. It just tells me they’re interested, so I know to send them a special email inviting them to register before I send out the general announcement.

That is commonly known as a “soft” call to action. There’s no pressure, no deadline, and no penalty for not acting. It does give them the opportunity to get advanced notice and probably an early-bird discount if they register.

Other options include:

A “soft sell” of a product or service you offer regularly.
The opportunity to schedule a free consultation with you.
A link to a relevant blog post, podcast, or article.
The opportunity to register for an upcoming free webinar or workshop.

Obviously, your call to action should tie into your email series topic. In my case, this is an email series about writing emails. Thus, I’m using the Email Batching Bootcamp as my CTA.

As you wrap up your email, you introduce your call to action, so everything ties together and makes sense.

Then you write your usual email sign off and you’re done.

Do that in each email and you’re sure to get results.

Repurposing Your Series of Emails on Your Blog

As I mentioned earlier, this blog post was originally written as a series of emails, sent to my subscribers over the last couple of weeks.

One of the many benefits of series is they’re very easy to repurpose. In this case, I repurposed them into a blog post. You can also repurpose them into:

An online article on a platform you don’t “own” like LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.
A VERY long social media post.
An “advertorial” for your product or service that you submit to online or print magazines.

Depending on how many series of emails you create, you could collect them into an eBook and sell it.

If you’d like to see the original emails I wrote with their intro and farewell transitions and full call to actions, click on the links below.

By the way, I hadn’t decided to make this into a series of emails when I sent the first one, so it didn’t get the fancy bracketed subject line like the rest of them.

If you’d like to see how I transformed these emails into a blog post, click on the button below. I made a quick video to show you how it all works.

SEE HOW I TRANSFORMED MY SERIES OF EMAILS INTO A BLOG POST