What is an Email Blast?

Read this UniOne blog article to learn the definition of mail blasts. Find out what mass email is and how to use this marketing strategy effectively in order to drive sales for your business.

An email blast is a marketing email that a brand sends out to a large number of recipients simultaneously. This internet marketing method is thought to help with business promotion, the selling of goods and building connections with an audience.

Marketers carry out email blasts to deliver important information to customers (or at least, they intend to). Unlike spam mailings that are sent without the users’ consent, blasting emails are considered legitimate, since customers have subscribed to them.

However, there are too many things that can go wrong with email blast marketing. First, it implies little to no segmentation or personalization. Second, “blaster emails” are perceived as rude and invasive, because they often come out of the blue and may have no practical value for a specific customer. That’s why an email marketing blast has become an old-fashioned way to do business and current best practices suggest companies use thought-out email campaigns instead of a one-email-for-all type of marketing.

So, how could we make use of an email blast in the right way, if ever?

Use an Email Service Provider

Sending thousands of emails manually is a tedious task that takes a lot of effort and time. Moreover, these campaigns can add up over time and become very expensive. A mailing service helps to automate email marketing, increase its efficiency and reduce the overall cost of sending emails.

A mass mailing service is a company that allows you to send emails to several mailing lists at a specific time. You can send one message to thousands of customers simultaneously or compile a personalized message for each recipient from the mailing list.

The cost of email services depends on the number and frequency of messages you want to send. There are services that allow you to send up to 15,000 emails monthly for free. And for those who need more, these services provide favorable tariff plans. In Unione you can send one thousand emails for just $0.09.

Send to a Clean Email List

Instead of buying (or renting) a contact database, consider gathering your own, as organic subscription-based contact lists are the only healthy way to build customer relationships. They give a good engagement rate and have higher deliverability. On the other hand, using a purchased list is illegal and will only result in fines.

How to create your own database of email addresses:

• increase traffic to the web page with the newsletter subscription form;
• оffer your clients something valuable in exchange for their email address;
• а/b test various methods of collecting the database.

But to make your mailings more effective, you have to organize the mailing list and keep your subscribers engaged. Otherwise, your email campaigns will not give the results you expect, or even worse — the emails will end up in spam.

Email list validation can come in handy for that matter. Validation allows marketers to check the list before sending the newsletter. With such tools, you can clear your list of dead or invalid addresses, as well as spam traps and addresses with errors. This will improve email deliverability and your sender reputation.

Clean your mailing list regularly. If certain subscribers no longer open your emails and do not react to reactivation campaigns, remove their addresses from the mailing list right away. Regularly clear the database of non-active subscribers — this way you will protect the sender's reputation.

Personalize Your Lists With Segmentation

Segmentation means dividing the whole audience into several groups, instead of sending the same letter to one mass of subscribers. We often divide the audience by these factors:

• Demographic characteristics: age, gender, place of residence, income.
• Sales funnel stage: awareness, discovery, evaluation, intent, purchase, loyalty.
• Engagement level: identify active and inactive users, like those who read each and every email and those who have ignored them for three months.
• Personal preferences, motivational factors — for example, is the addressee a regular customer, or are they attracted by discounts and sales only?

A mass email blaster is a rather blunt and dangerous tool. Marketing within one giant contact base makes it almost impossible to create a newsletter that is equally interesting to everyone. Remember that brand that always sends you letters that are completely irrelevant to you? Well, their marketers work with the entire database at once. And there is not much benefit in creating an email blast.

One of the best way to form connections with a client is through a personalized email

Segmentation allows you to create much more targeted and relevant content for specific groups of people as opposed to an email blast list. Segment characteristics determine the content and purpose of communication. This is exactly what you need for the success of your campaigns.

According to DMA, segmented campaigns bring 760% more profit growth than blast email campaigns. Thus, the efforts spent on segmentation and content selection can bring excellent results and so benefit the brand. Email segmentation gives subscribers a positive experience of interacting with the brand. This helps build personal relationships with each client and strengthens their emotional connection to the product.

Include a Clear Call to Action

If the email has not been opened, send it once again, but this time change the subject line of the email. And if the user has finally opened the message, but did not perform the necessary action, send another letter with a different CTA.

Ideally, each letter should have one primary call to action. This way the user's attention will not be scattered to other buttons or text links. If this is not doable in your case, make one CTA more noticeable.

Conclusion

In email marketing, as well as with other marketing channels, you always need to keep in mind your ultimate goal. What do you want to achieve with a blast email newsletter or an email campaign?

• More traffic to the site?
• More downloaded materials?
• More orders of your products?

The answer to these questions will determine your actions when creating campaigns. It will dictate what to write in the subject of the letter, its header, body section and a call to action. No email blasting marketing campaign can help you do that, but a well-thought personalized and segmented email campaign can.

So, instead of asking yourself how to do email blast, think of a harder but more beneficial personalized approach.