Amount of copy in emails, who is reading it, what will they do with it

Short Or Long Copy In Newsletters: What's The Smart Choice?
by Cynthia Edwards, Monday, August 10, 2009, 10:30 AM for Media Post's Email Insider.

Cynthia hits the nail right on the head with this one, the constant quandary of how much to say in the email and how much to leave for the web-site.

The article does well to categorise emails but in my opinion it does not touch on anything further than the recipient's experience and convenience, which is not enough for me.

I'm a fan of getting the web-site to do as much work as possible, especially when the most commonly use email client, Outlook, is the worst rendering engine of all email clients - apart from from maybe Lotus notes?

Get the click through and send them to the site to engage, interact, share it, comment, buy something, click the adverts etc. etc.

But Cynthia still has a point that different reasons for the email will result in a different action. You have to decide if you want to support the recipients' preferred action and make it more convenient or try and nudge them towards what you want to do and still enable them toget what they want without having to work too hard.
For instance, with recipes, of course the most convenient thing would be to have it in your inbox, so you can have the laptop open or the iphone in the kitchen or print it straight out.

Alternatively you think about the least someone would need to have in front of them to make the decision of whether or not to cook it now, then give them a button to click to get the best view to run with it, make it printable, make it go to the iphone friendly site if they are on an iphone.

Or am I wrong? - are the people who will ask for these emails people who would not be inclined to click that extra link, would they need the whole recipe right there - my Grandmother would probably want it right there out of fear of breaking it - if she could use a computer. My mother (she's 60 next weekend) knows how to click a link and use a browser?

All in all I'm all about the teaser to get the click through. I need to be motivated to allocate my time to read something more than 300 characters.

anyway, it is a good article...read on