What You Need When Blasting Emails

Blasting emails is the strategy of sending a single email to a large distribution list simultaneously. There’s little strategy involved, such as no personalization or segmented lists, so, the emails fall on deaf ears and is ineffective. This isn't to be confused with email marketing in general. Email blasts are just a part within your larger email marketing strategy as a whole.

Before email best practices and legal regulations, many marketers followed this strategy with the idea that the more inboxes they could reach, the more likely they would be to get people to open the emails and purchase from them.

However, with new email practices in place, we now understand that increased engagement actually comes from sending to a smaller and genuinely interested audience, rather than bombarding people’s inboxes with offerings. This is because the audience agrees to get responses about the business's services or products.

So, what do you need when blasting emails? You need to know how to set up a proper strategy from your email blasts, with an offer that gives good content to the audience as well as showing the potential or current customer value to those items (and your business as a whole).

Though there is no set "right" way to do this, let us guide through some of the best email campaign delivery types step by step along with suggesting some of the best email marketing services and apps.

Table of Contents

• Why Send Email Blasts?
• Designing Email Blast Campaigns
  • Design
  • Content
  • Call-to-Actions
  • Extras
• Setting Up an Email Blast
• Email Blast for Ecommerce
• Emails for Contractors
• How to Measure Email Blast Performance
• Email Platforms that Offer Email Blast Service
• What's Next?

Why Send Email Blasts?

How can sending an email blast really help your business? What are the benefits of blasts vs sending a regular email every once in a while? The difference is that email blasts are simply one email sent to a large number of people wither to advertise a product or service, give discounts for holidays or whatever email marketing message your business wants to send. Sending one email to one contact.

Those emails are generally a campaign to get a customer back because they had something in their cart, or the email will have a personalized name on it because it is to directly give the contact a discount or let users know about an update with their order or account.

Something to note about sending email blasts is that there are now regulations in place that prevent marketers from sending batch and blast emails to a list of subscribers who may or may not have actually opted in to receive communications. Ultimately, sending mass emails can land you in the spam folder, resulting in a poor sending reputation and distrust from your audience. 

That is not to warn you away from sending to a large list of subscribers, as long as you’re also segmenting your contact list and sending relevant messages to your targeted subscribers. And on the occasions that you did send an email blast, that email should follow the CAN-SPAM Act, include an unsubscribe link, and accurately identify the person or business that is deploying the email. 

To send email blasts may seem like an easy way to get your email in someone's spam folder, but it's main goal is to convert leads into customers and boost sales from current customers. It also is the best tactic to spread awareness of your brand.

Would you be interested to know that a clothing company only sells eco-friendly products? Would you also be interested in what specific items are made from organic material? A lot of shoppers are now interested in knowing these things about companies as it impacts their decision in purchasing items or services. 

Designing Email Blast Campaigns

Aside from your email marketing campaign message, you will have to ask yourself what your business wants from the contacts. Do you want them to click on a new product? Do you want them to take part in the discount code provided in the email? Or do you simply want to encourage them to click on any of the links in the email to take them to your website? Yes, you can have multiple call-to-action buttons. Let us go over some ways to design your email blasts based on your intent.  

Design

The design of your email blast matters and will vary depending on on the type of email marketing campaigns and goals you have for each email. Will you want to advertise your new product with an image in the first block of your email blast? Or do you want a gif or carousel of the many products on sale? A few other things to keep in mind will include:

• Where to place each block or widget in your email blast
• Where to put your call-to-action button and where it will take those who clicks on the link
• How many buttons or links you need in your message
• How many images you want in your message
• What text and header (or subheaders) you want in the email 
• What brand colors to include (what colors will look good as a background or behind a header)

Content

Aside from deciding which links to include in your ecommerce email blasts and how many images or gifs to include, you will have to think about other content that gives your customers value. This includes:

• Exactly what graphics will best advertise what you're offering
• What offer statement or value the potential or loyal customer can take part in, such as a discount code or refer-a-friend deal
• Which contacts in your email list will appreciate content like free gift guides, a free service with the purchase of a service, etc.

You can also offer extra content for free within the email, such as downloadable documents or guides. For example, a furniture business can give a free guide or downloadable catalog with inspiration and tips on how to decorate your home and arrange furniture for the best feng shui.

This type of content is often loved by subscribers, especially because subscribers don't feel as though they have to read pointless advertising in order to take part in a coupon code. They are simply offered something for free - the marketing and effect of the email campaigns are considered in the content itself, not the design or message in the email.

Call-to-Actions

The point of all email campaigns are to include call-to-action buttons. This engagement can take your contacts to your website, to download free content as mentioned before, or take them to specific pages (like sale pages) on your website. 

In all other type of emails, subscribers are often sent emails like those with buttons that take them to tracking the shipping of a product they just bought or to look at the receipt of what they purchased. You will want to have constant contact with these customers because they are no longer considered a lead and will need different marketing directed to them. Personalized emails most of the time work well with audiences.

The design of your call-to-action button should be personalized no matter which platform you decide to partner with to use for your email deliverability. You can create padding on your button, change the colors, and any other aspect of the buttons to match your brand. The most important thing is that you will need to make this button in your campaign very enticing and welcoming for email openers to click on. Some tips for this include:

• Making the button large or visible enough for those to see
• Make it clear that the button is clickable, such as putting it in the middle of email blasts or at the top
• Create text that clearly states where it will take the visitor, such as to the sales page or to the updates page of your site
• Begin the text on the button with a clear 'action', such as "Check out our new dresses" or "Read our latest newsletter"

The example below has a clear CTA button, which entices openers to click on the "SHOP NOW" button or view holiday store hours. Note that there is another CTA button that wants you to click on it to shop for a specific Clarisonic product.

Extras

One thing to keep in mind is how you want to time email blasts to go out to your audience. Is your target audience mostly working mothers who only open emails at night? Or does your audience tend to open emails in the afternoon on weekdays? Some A/B testing can help you gather data on what times and how often your audience opens your emails.

Setting Up an Email Blast

For ecommerce businesses and contractors alike, setting up an email blast is usually daunting to those who aren't tech-savvy or professional marketers themselves. You can name your business or campaign anything you want, but setting up your email blast shouldn't be complicated to the point of coding. Luckily, campaigns in email apps are easy to get set up. The steps are as easy as this:

• The first step to send an email marketing campaign is to log in to your email marketing or automation tool.
• Choose your email list. 
• Design your email blast. 
• Run spam and delivery tests.
• Schedule email delivery. 
• Preview your email blast.
• Send your campaign!

There will be some steps after you've sent your email campaign, such as measuring the effectiveness in sales boosting or email engagement, which we covered in measuring email blast performance. You can also resend email campaigns to non-openers, which is usually a good idea a few days after the original email was sent. Of course, edit the blast to make it fresh with a slightly new message (or text) and new subject line or preheader.

Email Blasts for Ecommerce

Here are some email blast ideas for ecommerce businesses. These may not be one size fit all, but these mailing techniques will focus on the right message and where the store's CTA buttons lead to. For this example, let us focus on a common ecommerce business nowadays - the online clothing store.

For online stores, there are a few common email blasts that they will need to send, which include:

New stock notice. Encouraging repeat purchases is a critical driver of revenue for any ecommerce company. 

Targeted campaigns & newsletters. Customers of one online store won't be the same for another, so making sure your contact list is similar in either demographic or product interest is vital when directing the right email campaign to them.

Sales advertisement email. This is a little obvious. Perhaps it's the holidays or there is just a blowout sale happening for an online store. These are great emails to send right as the sale or new product is put up for sale on the site.

Testimonial email. Give customers and leads more reason to buy from the store. The right video or text message praising the business can convince people to make that purchase.

Survey email. Sometimes this is not considered an email blast, but hear us out. If a business just wants feedback on their email marketing or want to know the right products to sell to a certain group, then survey emails are great! Especially if they offer one or two coupon codes to apply to the store after the survey is submitted. Make sure your email platform can input a form for the survey or simply direct your contacts with a CTA button to a survey page.

Emails for Contractors

We get it. You may have a business that focuses on services other than ecommerce. For this example, we will show you how to make email blast campaigns for services. We will use construction workers, but these tips can be translated into other types of services, such as salons, cleaning services, laundromats, etc. 

Easy to scan. Other than giving a contact an enticing subject line to make them open the email, contractors should make emails easy to scan so readers can pick out the most valuable information at a glance. Not everyone has time to sit down and read an entire email.

This means that contractors need to make emails easy to scan so that people can easily pick up the information that they're trying to convey. You can also break up the text with images and graphics that support your points and give readers an inside look at your company. This can help them gain trust in your business and help them feel more confident in their decision to choose you for their construction needs.

Avoid spam triggers. Take steps to avoid spam triggers in order to keep these emails in recipients’ inboxes instead of their spam folders. Words like free, help, deal, win, trial, special offer, and order now can trigger spam filters.

Different kinds of CTAs. Contractors can also save a reader's time by having simple messaging and clear CTAs that they may not find for an ecommerce business. These include buttons that once contacts click them, they can call the contractor's business on the phone. Click-to-call buttons are popular, but so are other buttons that give the audience other ways to contact the business, like email or google maps directions to the shop.

Everything else that are included for email campaigns for every other type of business can be included in the right email blast from a contractor. Just remember to use the right messaging to entice your subscribers to click further into the company's site or get them to contact the business directly since that's what business who offer services are all about!

How to Measure Email Blast Performance

When you send email blasts in bulk, this generally means you will have a ton of contacts receiving the emails. Most email marketing platforms will have an email marketing tool to measure how many from your contact list opened the emails and clicked through the email to a page on your website (which is easier measured by an all-in-one platform that includes landing page or websites you can create). But how do you really measure an email blast performance?

• Check the bounce rate on your email campaign landing pages. Bounce rate is a measurement of the percentage of website visitors who land on your page but end up leaving immediately (a second to a few seconds) without doing anything else.
• Measure website traffic. Other than your landing pages, check to see how the pages on your website are doing. Are you getting a lot of visitors every day or just on weekends? You should see number of views, bounce rate, and more after setting up campaign tracking to your site (connecting an email campaign with your website).
• Look at email conversion rate. You'll want to view actions like those who make a purchase, download a lead magnet (content), fill out a form, or sign up for a webinar or something else. If 10 people made an action after opening your email and you sent 100 emails, then the conversion rate is 10%.
• Track email list growth rate. This includes number of new subscribers, number of people who unsubscribed, and total subscribers on your list.
• Track spam rate. To find out if you're providing value in these email blast campaigns, divide spam complaints by the total number of emails delivered and multiplying that by 100. 50 spam complaints out of 5,000 emails would be a rate of 1%, which isn't bad!

Email blasts performance can be calculated by choosing an email app that clearly gives data for each email blast sent. This email blast service should be easy to read or at the very least easy to calculate once you have all the numbers.

Email Platforms that Offer Email Blast Service

Some platforms give great email blast service, such as calculating your spam rate. Some even give quick visuals, such as a red dot next to an email that did poorly or a green or yellow dot for those that did well. Check out these email app options that give great email marketing data and other email blast service, such as informing you of the the deliverability of each message.

TruVISIBILITY

TruVISIBILITY has it all in terms of landing pages, chatbots, and email app that work together. You can have the option to try the email app for free without connecting it to your website, but you'll find the email blasts you send will return with great data that you may want for landing pages or chatbots as well.

When you send an email blast, you can resend to non-openers after 48 hours of sending the original email blast with an option to rework your subject line and subheader to possibly gain more opens and click-throughs. Of course, every email blast you wish to send and set up can be automated. This means you can send a particular email to your audience if a certain action is taken. An email blast can go out to all site visitors, for example, who put items in their cart but don't finalize a purchase. 

[TruVIS]

Keap

Similar to GetResponse, Keap prides themselves on CRM, sales, and marketing automation. It is a one-stop shop for lead capture, customer support, email and SMS campaigns, and calendar booking. You can also post invoicing to clients with Keap as your platform of choice. Like TruVISIBILITY, you can also choose to create landing pages with their app. Unlike Mailgun or SendGrid, Keap has a clear and understandable platform to create email blasts, send them or automate them, and record how many turn into sales from your site.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign claims to be made for email campaigns for small to mid-size businesses. One of their redeeming qualities is that they make sure they have the best practices put in place for email automation. Need to make a newsletter that goes out every Thursday? They have the right templates and easy-to-use app to make that happen. 

Like TruVISIBILITY, they also have the right templates for almost every instance you can think of other than newsletters. Need to sell a new product? There's an email template for it. Need to boast about your updated website? There's a template for that too. Unfortunately, ActiveCampaign doesn't have a viable "free" version since their "lite" plan is as low as $9/month. This all depends on how many contacts you currently have in your mailing list, though. If you send to more than 100,000 contacts that you send an email campaign to, it could cost you over $549 per month.

What's Next?

Hopefully, you've learned not only what an email blast is but how to set them up properly according to your type of business, which platform is best for you to send emails through, and which message you should use to target the right audience. Go ahead and create a campaign that can go out to tons of contacts for free!

Want to connect your campaigns in email form to your website? Though most WordPress plugins have this option, TruVISIBILITY's platform gives every business the option to build their landing pages or websites and connect each email blast to it. You can track activity of all your users and adjust your campaigns accordingly to get the best campaign to boost sales. View the entire suite here. Or contact us via phone +1 (833) 878-2428 or email support@truvisibility.com.