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I stopped writing long
emails to customers
— and started
getting replies

I spent a year writing thorough, detailed update messages to customers. Nobody read them. Here’s what happened when I cut the word count by two-thirds.

I used to write good emails. Long ones. Full ones. They had a greeting, a context paragraph, the update, a next-steps section, and a warm sign-off. They were thorough. A customer who read one would know everything there was to know about where their deal stood.

The problem was that nobody read them.

I noticed it slowly. A customer would call me two hours after I’d sent a detailed update, asking the same questions I’d answered in writing. Another would reply saying “can you just confirm —” followed by a detail I’d put in paragraph two. A third never replied at all.

For a while I blamed the customers. If they just read what I sent, they’d have the full picture. But that thinking keeps you stuck. The customer isn’t sitting at a desk reading your email with care. They’re at work, or driving, or looking after the kids, or standing in a car showroom. They’re scanning the first few lines to find out whether this is good news or bad news. If they don’t see the signal fast enough, they move on.

I decided to test the opposite approach. Short messages. Three sentences. Maybe four. The shortest ones I’ve sent since are a single line: “Approved. Need to see your photo ID. You free tomorrow morning?”

The results weren’t subtle. Reply rates went up. Response time went down. Customers who used to call confused started sending quick confirmations instead. I was spending less time composing messages and less time follow up — and the person on the other end was actually getting what they needed.

What changed when I cut the word count

The first thing I noticed was how much of my email was filler. Warm-up sentences. “Hope you’re well.” “Just following up on our conversation last week.” “As discussed, the lender has confirmed…” None of it was bad. It was all polite and professional. It was also invisible. Customers don’t need to know you remember last week’s conversation. They need to know what’s happening now.

I started stripping the opening entirely. No greeting. No pleasantries. The first word was the reason I was writing.

Before: “Hi Sarah, hope you’re well. I’m writing with an update on the application we submitted on Monday. The lender has come back with an offer, and I’ve attached a copy for you to review. The rate is as discussed — 8.9% over 48 months. Please give it a read when you get a moment, and let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Emmanuel.”

After: “Good news — lender offered 8.9% over 48. I’ve attached the offer sheet. Have a look and I’ll send the documents over once you’re happy.”

The second version is 30 words versus 68. It gets read. It gets replied to. It moves the deal forward — which is the only job the message had in the first place.

I applied the same thing to bad news. If a deal gets declined, I used to write a careful, cushioning paragraph explaining why, softening the blow, offering alternatives. Now I write: “Lender declined on this one. I’ve got two other options to try. Do you want me to put a case in with [lender] next?” It’s more direct. It also keeps the customer focused on what happens next rather than stuck on what just happened.

The three-sentence rule

The format I landed on is almost always three things in this order:

1. What happened. A single line. Approved, declined, waiting, query, funded. Just the outcome.
2. What it means for them. Do they need to do something? Wait for something? Is there a date to expect?
3. The next step. A question or a call to action. Keeps the ball in their court.

Three sentences. Sometimes I skip the second one if the action is obvious. Sometimes I add a fourth if the customer needs a choice to make. But I never go further. If the message needs more than four lines, it probably needs a phone call instead.

That distinction is important too. Short messages work for updates, confirmations, and quick questions. They don’t work for complex conversations. If the customer has a complaint, or the deal structure is genuinely unusual, I pick up the phone. The short email is for communication, not discussion. Knowing when to switch is as important as knowing how to write the message.

What AI taught me about my own writing

This is where it connects to the tools I build. When I was designing how MANO drafts messages for brokers, I had to think consciously about what makes a message effective. The default behaviour of most AI tools is to be verbose — they generate four paragraphs for a question that needs two lines. That’s because they’re trained on the internet, and the internet rewards comprehensiveness.

But a customer reading on a phone screen at 6pm doesn’t want comprehensive. They want to know what’s happening and whether they need to do anything. That’s it. Everything beyond that is noise.

So I hard-coded the constraint. When the system generates a message for a broker, it tries to stay under three sentences. It leads with what happened, then what the customer needs to know, then what to do next. The broker can always add more if the situation needs it — but the default is short. That constraint came from watching myself write long messages and seeing nobody read them.

The irony isn’t lost on me. I spent months building an AI tool to do something I wasn’t doing well myself. But that’s also how most real improvements happen on a sales floor — you notice a pattern in your own behaviour, build a guardrail, and let the system carry it forward when you’re too busy to think about it.

The real shift

The lesson here isn’t about word count. It’s about respect for the person on the other end. A short message respects the customer’s time. It says: I know you’re busy, I know you’ve got other things going on, I’m going to tell you what matters and then let you get back to your day.

That respect gets repaid. The customers who used to ghost my long emails now reply within the hour. The ones who needed follow-up calls to confirm they’d read the update send a thumbs-up emoji and move on. The deal velocity improved not because I was working harder, but because the communication was actually designed to work for the person receiving it.

I still write a long message now and then when the situation genuinely calls for it. But most of the time, the shortest version is the right one. If the message has more than three sentences, I ask myself whether it needs to be a call instead. More often than not, the answer tells me something useful about how quickly I’m trying to close the gap.