What is an email blast?
As the name suggests, an email blast involves sending a single email to a large number of recipients at once. In most cases, it is used by marketers to broadcast offers, events, and any other type of marketing message to one or more email lists or a large subset of one or more email lists.
If you want a more in-depth understanding of this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: How do I do an email blast?
As we have seen in the previous section, all it takes to do an email blast is to craft the email and send it to a lot of people at once.
Of course, this is not something you can do with just your personal email account because it most likely has a daily sending limit. Using it to do an email blast is a great way to have it flagged for spam and blacklisted by different mail servers.
To successfully do an email blast, you will need to use an email marketing tool such as MailChimp, SendInBlue, or Constant Contact. They will not only allow you to send emails to a much wider audience, but also provide you with handy automation and segmentation tools.
Question #2: What are the benefits of doing an email blast?
The biggest benefits of doing an email blast include:
- Time savings
- Reach
Let us take a closer look at each one:
First, doing an email blast saves you a whole lot of time because it eliminates the need for you to manually craft hundreds (or thousands) of emails and send them out one at a time to each recipient. All you have to do is write a single email and send it to however many recipients you want in one go.
Second, since email blasts allow you to email thousands—or even hundreds of thousands if you have a massive email list—of recipients at once, it gives you significantly more reach than if you email each of your prospects and customers one at a time.
Question #3: What are the downsides to doing it?
The biggest downside to doing an email blast is that if you do it wrong, you risk losing both prospects and existing customers.
But what exactly does doing it wrong look like? Below are some examples:
- Sending out emails with zero personalisation
- Sending out emails out of the blue
- Sending out irrelevant emails
Let us take a look at each one in more detail:
First, sending out generic emails with absolutely no personalisation is a great way to make your recipients feel as if they are nothing but a number to you—even if you start your email off with something like “Dear valued customer”. After all, if you truly valued them, you would have at least taken the time to write their name, right?
Second, unprompted emails feel pretty much the same as an ad. Nobody likes them because they interrupt whatever the recipient is doing.
Finally, irrelevant emails, just like those with zero personalisation, make the recipient feel as if you see them as just another person to sell to. After all, if you actually valued them, you would send them marketing messages that are designed to address their specific needs.
Question #4: How can I make it more effective?
To make your email blast more effective, you can incorporate techniques such as:
- Segmentation
- Automation
- Email A/B testing
Let us take a closer look at each one:
First, segmentation, as the name suggests, involve dividing your main email list into subsets based on criteria such as:
- Interests
- Position in the buyer’s journey
- Demographics
Doing so makes it so much easier to send out relevant emails to the right recipients.
Second, automation allows you to send out timely and relevant emails based on predetermined triggers such as:
- A user signing up for a webinar
- A customer making a purchase
- A prospect sending in a product inquiry via email
Finally, email A/B testing involves testing two (or more) versions of the same email to small sections of your email list to find out which version is the most effective before sending it out to everyone else.