When you hear the word blast, what comes to your mind? An explosion or maybe a blow of sand storm.
Email blast resembles this picture as it means sending email to your entire email list simultaneously. Most of the time, marketers may send email campaigns to their entire list without any strategy.
Result? More bounces that hurt your domain's reputation.
However, you can get the desired results by strategically planning professional email blasts. In this guide, we will learn what an email blast is, why it is used, and the best practices you must follow when sending email blasts to achieve your email marketing objectives and keep your subscribers happy and engaged.
What is an email blast?
An email blast, also known as broadcast emails, mass emails, bulk emails, and e-blasts, is the process of simultaneously sending an email to a large audience. Organizations use email blasts to promote products, share news, announce events, and engage with customers.
Email blast can be an effective email marketing tool when used appropriately. Here’s why you should consider implementing it:
To quickly reach a broad audience.
To share time-sensitive updates.
To increase brand visibility.
To drive traffic to your website.
How are email blasts different from email campaigns?
If you’re new to bulk email sending, you might confuse the terms "email blast" and "email marketing campaign". While both approaches seem similar, they serve different purposes in a well-rounded email marketing strategy.
An email campaign involves a series of strategically crafted emails sent to a targeted smaller group of recipients over a designated timeframe. The goal is to nurture relationships, enhance brand awareness through constant contact, and ultimately drive conversion rates.
In contrast, the primary aim of an email blast is to deliver a single message to a wide audience, making a broad impact without the need for follow-up.
How to send an email blast effectively
Here is a step-by-step breakdown of sending an email blast for enhanced performance:
1. Define your goals
The foremost thing to do is define what you want to achieve through sending bulk emails. Do you want to increase signup by a certain number? Do you want to increase demo booking by 15%?
It can be anything, but it should be achievable, measurable, and practical. If you aren’t clear about your goals, sending an email blast will serve no purpose.
2. Choose a reliable email service provider (ESP)
Sending a strategic email blast can be a hassle, so choosing a reliable ESP is wise. It can help you build and manage your email contacts list, monitor your IP and domain reputation, analyze email performance, track users’ data, etc., and offer insights on where to improve.
There are many ESPs in the market that offer you various services. But, if you want higher open rates and conversions on your email blasts, you should check out the AMP email by Mailmodo.
3. Create and segment your email list
If you send an email blast to a purchased email list will mean one thing only - high bounce, low email deliverability, and a bad reputation. We recommend you build up a clean email list with users’ permission to avoid that.
You can read our guide on how to build an email list from scratch to learn more.
After you have a clean mailing list, you should segment it. Email list segmentation is a great strategy to target different segments based on users’ demography, behaviors, geography, etc.
4. Create and design your email
It’s time to delve into the most important task - creating and designing the email. Here are a few tips that we recommend:
Write a compelling, relevant, and engaging email subject line. Do not try to lure users by writing clickbait subject lines like GRAB YOUR COPY NOW!!! It will only trigger the spam filters.
Make your emails accessible so that everyone can read and understand them.
Don’t forget to make your emails responsive for different devices, OS, and browsers.
Add alt text if you add images or GIFs in the images.
Must include a clear and compelling call to action.
You can also read our guide on email design best practices to create valuable and relevant mass email campaigns to generate higher conversions.
5. Test and send your email
At this stage, you've completed all the essential steps, and the next task is to send your email and optimize it based on email metrics. This should be an ongoing process. Conducting A/B tests is one effective method to find out what performs better. With A/B testing, you can try out different subject lines, layout designs, and calls to action to see what resonates more with your audience, allowing you to select the most effective email.
Examples of effective email blasts
Understanding the different scenarios where email blasts shine can help you engage your subscribers and drive results. Below are some of the best email blast examples to enhance your marketing efforts.
Promotional offers: An announcement about a limited-time discount or flash sale, encouraging quick action from subscribers. This is a perfect example of using bulk emails to notify all your subscribers.
Event announcements: E-blast about an upcoming webinar, conference, or special event, providing details on how to register or participate and creating more awareness about your event.
New product and feature launches: A blast introducing a new product or a new feature, highlighting its benefits, and inviting customers to check it out.
Newsletter updates: An email blast summarizing recent articles or highlights of an organization, encouraging subscribers to read more on their website.
Best practices to send an email blast
Email marketers should consider email best practices while sending out bulk emails, which are as follows:
1. Segmenting your email list
Every user is different in behavior, demography, preferences, and many other ways. That’s why email segmentation is vital to get your message to target subscribers.
2. Sending personalized and targeted emails
Personalized emails are the secret weapon to get more engagement by sending more targeted emails to your subscribers.
3. Making emails accessible to all
Email accessibility is an emerging trend in email marketing, and marketers are making their emails much more accessible for users with human disabilities or technical limitations like visual impairments, image rendering issues, etc.
To know more about accessibility check out a11project.
4. Making responsive emails for different devices and screen sizes
Without a thorough understanding of your email subscribers’ device usage, you might send emails that don’t render well across different devices. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what might happen when responsive email design is not prevalent in your email marketing service.
Check out Litmus's email client share to know about device usage by your subscribers.
Way forward
Email blasts may have a bad reputation, but you have the solution to make them more effective. But your work doesn’t stop after you press the send button. How would you ensure that all the time, effort, and resources you put into creating a strategic email blast have generated results?
Yes, with email analytics.
You must track and track the email marketing metrics and use that data to develop helpful insights. You can then use these insights to analyze your progress and improve future email blasts.
