What is an Email Blast? Ensure a high ROI from Email Blasts

An email blast is a process of sending the same email to your complete email list. And it also goes by the name broadcast, bulk email or mass email.

Features that differentiate email blast from an email campaign

An email blast is:

1. Sent to the entire list vs a segmented one
2. Not targeted or personalized
3. Sent at the same time to everyone

You might have doubts about launching an email blast because why not use features to segment & personalize that are provided by all ESPs. So why would someone still do an email blast?

You might have doubts about launching an email blast. Why should someone still do an email blast when you can speak to each customer differently with all the advanced features ESPs are providing?

That’s because sometimes you don’t need to personalize heavily or segment like a ninja. You work on email marketing to make it more efficient, not to show off any skills for using features.

When to send an email blast?

Here are some scenarios when blasting an email makes sense:

1. Sending a set of guidelines to your audience,
2. Launching a storewide sale
3. Offering a free webinar
4. Sending out a newsletter
5. Launching a new feature.

Since you would be dealing with only one email and one list, you will save both effort and time. You won’t have to create groups of people, tags or collect data.

Smart marketers also save money with blast emails. They choose an ESP that offers basic features of blasting email and provides bulk rates. Hence costing less than the ESPs with advanced features.

How does the process of sending an email blast look?

Compose a single message, attach your whole list in the Send To section and hit that Send button.

That’s just a high-level view. There are things you need to be on top of to ensure that your efforts have a high ROI:

1. Clean your list - remove any bounced, invalid, unsubscribed email IDs
2. Do not try to say many things in one email. Say one thing, clearly.
3. Choose a clear, straightforward subject line
4. Give a clear CTA for people to engage
5. Choose an email marketing software that has a high delivery rate

If you already don’t know, you should check out SendX, a young, 4yo ESP already helping 3000+ companies send emails with a high delivery rate. At affordable prices and with all the essential features in easy to use interface, it’s a steal. You can check it for free for 14-days.

How to do email blasts effectively?

Segment your list

Segmentation means dividing your audience into categories based on certain similar characteristics. You can divide based on age, gender, purchase history or location and many more such points.

This will help you send the right emails to the right audience. For example, if you run a fashion brand and want to inform all of your subscribers about a store wide offer, you should segment your list based on gender. Then you should send an email with images of female clothing to females and email with male clothing pictures to males & so on. This would keep the email relevant for everyone.

Keep one CTA

The success of email is determined by how many people went to the next step after reading the emails, meaning how many people took the action you wanted them to take.

To optimize for getting maximum people to visit your landing page, sales page or checkout your store, have only one kind of CTA. This doesn't mean you don't repeat the CTA but every hyperlink or button should lead to the same place.

Make it easy to unsubscribe

Your unsubscribe link should be clearly visible in the footer or on top of the email. Subscribers shouldn't have to make efforts to find it. It should be one-click unsubscribe process - no login, or filling of forms should be required.

This ensures that people don't mark your emails spam if they don't find them relevant. When you send an email blast, a lot of subscribers might want to unsubscribe. And if you don't let them go, they will mark your emails as spam. This will lower your sender's reputation, making future emails also land into spam.

Measure your results

When you blast an email, your job doesn't end there. After at least 24 hours, you should measure the key email marketing metric such as open rate, click to open rate, unsubscribe rate etc. to see how effective the email campaign was.

If you see lower than benchmark numbers for any of the key metrics, you should see why that could have happened and update your next campaign accordingly.

Choose the right email marketing platform

If you are not using an email marketing software already, let me tell you that you should start looking for options. If you are already using one, evaluate if this is the right choice for you.

For sending email blasts, you will need an ESP that allows unlimited emails to be sent. It should be affordable and cost shouldn't rise exponentially as you scale your email marketing.

Designing emails should be easy and quick. And as we discussed in the first point above that you should segment your list, the ESP should provide segmentation capabilities.

SendX checks the boxes on all the qualities you need in an ESP to blast emails to your list. The pricing starts from $7.49/mo for up to 1000 contacts. You can take a 14-day free trial today and test all the features.

 

How often can you blast an email?

Context is king when it comes to frequency. There is no single number that will fit for everyone.

The volume of communication one can stand from your company depends on how they engage with you and how valuable your email is.

Lastly, let’s look at two of the real-world email blasting examples:

Whatever you send - an email campaign, an email blast or a pigeon, just look at the ROI and judge for yourself what works best.

If you wish to read more about email blasting, you can check out this article on bulk emails.

 

FAQs

 

1) What is an email blast?

An email blast is a process of sending the same email to your complete email list. And it also goes by the name broadcast, bulk email, or mass email.

2) What is the difference between email blasting and email campaign?

An email blast is:

• Sent to the entire list vs a segmented one
• Not very targeted and personalized
• Sent at the same time to everyone

An email campaign can have 1 or more blasts as a part of the email campaign strategy. An email campaign can also include email drip sequences, A/B test emails, etc.

3) When should I go for an email blast?

Typically, you would want to go for an email blast when you are sending out newsletters, emails about your new feature launches, retention emails to existing clients, etc.

4) What are the benefits of an email blast?

You will derive the following benefits from an email blast.

• You save time - because you are not doing any segmentation, heavy personalization or automation.
• You save money - because you can use any basic, affordable ESP to get the job done.
• It doesn’t have to be fancy, so designing it is easier.

5) How often can I send an email blast?

It is generally regarded that sending one to two bulk emails a week is ideal for most merchants, especially if you’re just starting out with email. But context is important when it comes to frequency. You need to take a judgment call based on your email marketing strategy.

6) How can I ensure a high ROI from an email blast?

In order to achieve maximum ROI from an email blast, you need to follow certain best practices:

• Send only to ‘subscribers’
• Send it to a cleaned up list
• Follow anti-spam hygiene
• Make sure the message in your email is relevant to almost everyone on your email list.
• Optimize for mobile
• Include an unsubscribe link.