An Ultimate Guide to Email Blasts

What is an email blast and how does it work?

An email blast, otherwise known as mass emails or simply eblast, is a method of sending the exact same email to a large group of people. 

These emails are usually constructed with generic information that attempts to promote as much information about your company or brand in a single and hopefully engaging email. This is typically used for marketing emails involving newsletters, emails about new releases, and promotional emails with discounts and special offers.

This is often considered by marketers as one of the oldest methods of email marketing. Back in the day, the goal was just to reach as many inboxes as possible to generate maximum exposure without taking personalization or segmentation into consideration.

Are they effective?

Email blasts can be incredibly effective and helpful, especially for small businesses that do not have the resources to have a whole team purely for email marketing.

While email blasts achieve a great deal at getting your email across multiple inboxes, their effectiveness depends greatly on how you utilize them.

Many email marketers consider the use of eblasts obsolete as these emails have been found to produce little to no impact on their recipients. This is primarily due to the lack of personalization that caters to the target audience’s likes and dislikes.

Because these emails typically have a very general design and content, the recipients may not resonate with the email and its message. This could lead to your email getting ignored and, ultimately, subscribers forgetting about your brand.

Despite all of this, email blasts are still among the most reliable marketing strategies that produce excellent returns. You just need to know how to use them correctly.

In fact, email blasts that utilize segmentation can boost revenue by up to 760%. In addition, around 31% of business marketers agree that email campaign newsletters are the best way to generate leads.

Aren’t email blasts the same as spam?

Email blasts can sometimes be mistaken as spam because they come off as untargeted and have low engagement rates. Nevertheless, these emails aren’t spam. Spam emails, by nature, are any unwanted, unexpected emails that are sent to your inbox. 

Sometimes they can be just unwanted emails sent by random brands or companies. Other times, they can serve as Trojan horses for malware and other harmful things that wreak havoc on your computer. Check spam email examples for a better understanding.

Because they may come off unappealing and unanticipated, some messages sent through email blasts can potentially get marked as spam. Thus, the goal is always to send emails to people who have agreed to receive content from you and create an engaging and relevant email to avoid spam folders.

Pros and cons of using such a strategy

Of course, each email marketing strategy comes with its own sets of pros and cons. To help you decide if email blasts are the right choice for you, check out these lists of pros and cons that come with this course of action.

PROS:

1. Provides great exposure

Email blasts are meant to be sent to a great number if not all your subscribers. This allows you to get your message and brand out there exposing it to a much bigger audience easier and faster than you usually would with other marketing strategies.

2. Aids in brand recognition

Consistent email blasts can also continuously expose your brand to potential customers allowing them to recognize your brand better over time.

3. Saves time and money

Lastly, and probably most importantly, email blasts are easy to set up and can save you a ton of time. 

Because the message is uniform for all recipients, all you need to do is prepare one email. Aside from that, it also allows for automation giving you the opportunity to send these emails to certain lists at a preset time and date. This ultimately saves you a ton of effort and money.

CONS:

1. Appears impersonal

Email blast messages mostly contain generic information that doesn’t really cater to the interests of the recipient. As a result, the email might not have the desired impact and can ultimately end up getting ignored.

2. Miscategorized as spam

As promotional emails can often be unexpected or unwanted, they can sometimes be marked by recipients as spam, even if they have agreed to receive them previously. So, email services may automatically redirect your next emails to the spam folders, thus lessening the chances of them getting read.

3. Fierce competition

The use of this strategy to market and promote your brand and products is quite popular. This might make it difficult for you to truly capture your recipient’s attention as you have to compete with several other marketers that are also using email blasts to promote their own brands and products.

How to do an email blast?

While having a consistent email blast can make some marketers’ lives easier, it can be confusing at the start. To help you out, check out these steps to help you kick off your own email campaign.

Choose a campaign goal

First things first, you have to define your goals. What do you want to get out of sending this email blast?

Do you want to:

• Get more subscribers?
• Welcome new members?
• Market certain services or products?
• Update audience regarding new promos or features?
• Invite them to an event?
• etc. 

These goals will ultimately help you decide what type of email to use or if email blasts are ultimately the way to go or not. 

If your goal is to promote your brand, products, or services, or initiate relationships with your subscribers, then email blasts can be an effective way of doing so. 

See this promotional email from Drive for example:

However, if you want to establish deeper interactions or get your subscribers to be more involved with your brand, then you might want to explore other options.

Create a mailing list

Next, you have to establish your audience. Do you want all your subscribers or customers to receive this blast, or will you only limit this message to a specific list of people?

Establishing mailing lists through segmentation can help you create lists based on various criteria such as interests, age, email behavior, website behavior, or whatever you see fit.

By creating mailing lists and segmenting your recipients, you can personalize your message to fit your intended mailing list and cater to their interests and actions. This step is also what will potentially prevent your email from getting chucked into the spam inbox. 

Choose a service

While sending an email to a large audience can be a daunting task, it’s a breeze with the right email marketing service.

There are other email marketing services out there, just make sure that your service is:

• Within budget.
• Enables configuration of emails, lists, and automation.
• Provides options for automation in sending. 
• Easy and convenient to use.
• Allows you to monitor and improve email performance.

Some services may come with tools such as a campaign builder that provide several templates for you to construct your email. Many will also offer various monitoring tools so that you can see how your campaign is going.

The above-mentioned features are extremely important not only for full control and ease in creating email blasts but also so that you remain in the loop with regards to their performance and whatever improvements need to be done.

At the end of the day, choosing the right service is crucial as it can significantly affect the total effectiveness of your campaign.

Make it easy to unsubscribe

Email blasts can take up an incredible amount of space in one’s inbox. Allow your consumers to choose how much they want to interact with you by allowing them to unsubscribe from certain mailing lists. 

This, in turn, creates a positive relationship between you and your customer and can potentially increase the impact of the messages that they do want to receive from you.

Make sure that the unsubscribe button is not only visible but functional like in the example above. 

While this may seem counterproductive, it is crucial that you provide recipients with an easy way out of your mailing list should they no longer desire to receive your campaigns.

Send out your lists

Once you’ve done everything that was mentioned above, it is now time to send your email blast. However, you can’t just send it willy-nilly — no, sir. You need to identify the best time to send your emails.

Having your campaigns catch your recipients at convenient times can increase the potential of their opening, reading, and interacting with your email — the ultimate end goal of this whole process.

According to the latest statistics, the best time to send email campaigns is on workdays at around 8 AM which is usually the time most people sit down on their office chairs and open their emails.

Measure the performance and improve them

Sending your campaign does not mean that your work is done. In fact, sending your email is just the beginning. The real work begins days after you send your email blast as you analyze how people reacted to your campaign.

When creating an email blast, there isn’t a single quick-fix formula. You need to continuously monitor your campaign’s performance by monitoring statistics such as open rates, unsubscribes, and the like to see how they resonate with the audience. 

Through these numbers, you can get a better idea of where the strength of your campaign lies and implement improvements on your next eblast to elevate your brand’s marketing.

Top email blast examples

Still don’t know how to construct your email blast? Check out these examples we prepared so that you can get a better idea of how to create the best email campaign.

1. Google — Inform About the Latest Features

This email from Google was made to inform its users regarding adjustments and advancements made to its Google Workplace platform. 

In addition to that, it also achieves a side goal of highlighting how easy this platform is to use as well as its company’s unparalleled AI capabilities.

2. Kajabi — Invite People To Join an Event/Program

This email was constructed with the intention of inviting people to join a challenge event all while promoting the company’s services. 

It provides a list of expected outcomes as well as a breakdown of the content and resources available in this event. To top it all off, it allows for interaction by letting recipients immediately sign up through the email.

3. eyebobs — Promote Products/Services

The email above effectively promotes the company’s products and services by providing a minicataloge as well as an invitation to book an appointment with their offices.

In addition, it emits a sense of personalization by highlighting products that the company feels would best suit the recipient’s interest. These products could be generic selections or selected through an algorithm based on the recipient’s activity on the company’s website or other aspects.

4. The Newsette – Welcome Email

Another common use of the email blast is to welcome all new members to a certain website or organization. The example above welcomes a new subscriber to Newsette and provides information about what to expect from their subscription.

Bonus: It also provides information on how to keep their emails out of the spam or promo folder. 

5. Gather — Newsletter

One of the most common uses for eblasts are newsletters. This email from Gather serves as a letter that addresses all subscribers and informs them of the latest news, upcoming events, and updates with regards to their platform.

Blast emails alternatives

Sometimes blast emails may not be the best method for you for various reasons. Sometimes the process just isn’t for you or certain regulations in your country may limit you from utilizing an email campaign’s full potential. Don’t worry there are other alternatives you can make use of.

• If a customer adds an item to their cart and doesn’t check out, you can send an automated email reminding them of the item along with some discount codes and promotional information.
• If a subscriber clicks on a certain service that you provide, you can email them more information about it as well as an option to directly join an ongoing newsletter or event with regard to that service.

There are still many ways you can market your business through email even if you opt out of using blast emails.

Final thoughts

The use of email blasts is a terrific email marketing strategy that allows you to create maximum exposure for your brand and its message. However, you need to make sure that you construct your campaign correctly to create the desired impact and elicit the right response from your recipients.

To do that, you need to achieve the following:

• Select the right email service.
• Personalize and segment your email lists so that subscribers only get the emails they want.
• Create interesting, engaging emails.
• Continuously monitor your performance and improve when necessary.

Achieve all that, and you’ve got yourself a fast, winning eblast marketing system with low effort and low cost.