What are Email Blasts?

Oct 7, 2022
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Doing what’s best for your brand is crucial when you own or run a company. In many cases, this could involve getting the word out with various types of email marketing.

Most of the time, email marketing should be customised and tailored to the recipient, and creating the perfect email is almost an art form. However, there are also some instances where making a bit more noise might be the most appropriate action to take.

What is an email blast?

An email blast is a type of email campaign where you send one and the same email to a large number of recipients. Most commonly, there is no in-depth strategy or segmentation in email blasts and as a result, many people get emails that are irrelevant to them.

And even though some marketers may consider them spammy, email blasts do work well, even in 2023. When done right, it can yield amazing results. Done the wrong way, it can get your emails in the spam folder and hurt your sender reputation.

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Email blasts are not always the ideal option for email marketing. However, there are various reasons why they might sometimes be necessary. It’s crucial for business owners and marketers to get the message they want to convey across through an email blast without appearing spammy or simply annoying. 

Also known as email broadcasts or bulk emails, email blasts refer to mass email messages that are ‘blasted’ out or sent to your entire mailing list rather than using list segmentation. 

They are typically more general regarding the message and tone. As they are being sent to a larger audience with a broader reach, they do not have the more personal tone of the emails you might send to segmented lists with your email marketing software.

The 4 most important types of email blasts

An email blast is a general message you send to your entire audience to notify them of something. However, there are some cases where you might find it helpful to send your email blast to segmented lists of customers. This might depend on the type of email blast message that you are sending. Some of the different types of messages that you might send using email blast services include:

Reminders or Alerts

An email blast can be sent to provide an impactful, last-call message to your subscribers to remind them of an offer or promotion that is about to expire. You can use this type of email blast to alert your email list and encourage them to make a purchase now by reminding them that the offer won’t be around forever with a last-chance email. 

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This type of blast email might be worth sending to segmented email lists, as you’re likely only going to get results from recipients who are actually interested in the offer, product, or service.

Sales Offers

You can send a general email to all your subscribers to tell them about a flash sale, seasonal sale, or special offer you are running. This is another good email blast to send to segmented email lists according to gender, location, or occupation demographics. Or you can simply send a blast message to let all customers know about a sale you’re running.

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First Looks

If you’re about to launch a new product, or a new version of a popular product, then a blast email to provide a first look and more information can be a great way to inspire more curiosity in your email recipients. This can be an ideal way to get them more interested in something new that they can expect in the future.

Product and Service Launches

Informing subscribers about a new product or service you will launch is one of the most common reasons for an email blast. This is to ensure that the relevant audience is informed and to gather interest in the product or service for future release.

How to set up an email blast campaign in 5 easy steps

When you market your products or services via email, chances are that an email blast campaign is something you will need to think about setting up at some point. There are a few areas to focus on when setting up this type of campaign. Consider the following:

Identify your goals

It’s essential to have a clear purpose and goals for creating your email blast campaign before you send the messages out. Think about the message you want to send your subscribers that might be difficult or impossible for you to achieve with a typical segmented email campaign. 

For example, you may want to inform customers about an upcoming flash sale, a new product or service you are launching, or a reminder of a sale that is about to end soon. The content and design of your email should be based on the purpose of your email blast. 

Despite the differences between blast emails and regular marketing emails, you should put in the same level of planning and effort. Do not use one and the same email template for all of these instances – not only will this hurt your marketing results, but also your email deliverability.

Consider the impression you make

Like with any marketing email, you will need to think about the first impression you will make with your blast email campaign. The email subject and headline are two main areas to pay particular attention in your email content. These will be the first thing your recipient sees and will usually have a significant impact on whether or not they open the email. 

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Avoid vague or common subject lines and steer clear of anything that could be interpreted as spam or clickbait by various email marketing tools. You want to be precise with your offer and intuition to not only drive conversions, but also to get great email deliverability.

Create your email blast list

Segmenting your email list based on customer types might not always be necessary for a blast email campaign, but you can do it to get more control over the content and message that you are hoping to convey. 

Blast emails tend to be more general than specific or targeted; however, this does not mean that segmenting your email won’t help you get a better result. It can be beneficial to segment your email list based on different demographic segments, as not every email blast message will concern everybody in your audience. 

It can also help you ensure that some personalization is still included, even in a generic message, which can increase your engagement rate in your future campaigns.

Create the ideal content

Email blast messages tend to be non-specific and more general in nature. However, they do not have to be boring. In the same way as any other email marketing campaign, it’s worth putting plenty of effort into creating the ideal content, choosing the perfect theme, tone, colors, fonts, pictures, and wording to ensure that the right message is put across. 

Any content you create for your email blast message should be exciting, crisp, and thought-provoking. Your email editor will be of great help here. Do not be afraid to put in some extra time in the design process to make every single email message stunning and effective.

Measure the results

The final step when setting up an email blast campaign is determining how you will measure the results of your email marketing efforts. You can track various metrics, including website or online store views, purchases, customer inquiries, customer feedback, and more. Finding ways to measure all these metrics will give you a clearer idea of how interactive and effective your email blast message is.

Conduct analysis on various important metrics such as the bounce, open, and click-through rates to determine if any areas need to change in your promotional email. It can be worth performing A/B testing on your email to test different subject lines, email body design aspects, wording and more to see which performs better for a specific target audience.

How effective are email blasts?

If you are creating an email blast message, there’s often more to it than you might realize at first. Whether or not you can run an effective email blast campaign will depend mainly on the purpose of the message and who the recipients are. 

For example, you might find that sending out an email blast to remind customers that a sale you’re running is about to end might be a very effective option. Customers will rush to the website to be in with a chance of grabbing a bargain before it’s too late. Or if you’re having a product launch with an attractive discount – that will also get people flocking to the website.

On the other hand, other forms of email blast messages might be less effective in terms of click-through rates and conversion rates. For example, a first look at a new product, as email subscribers have no immediate action to take.

Best practices for blast campaigns

When sending out an email blast campaign, there are some best practices to help you get the desired results through relevant messages. Here are some things to keep in mind when setting up your future email blast campaign and email marketing automation.

Focus on the email subject line first

The subject line will be essential when running a successful email blast campaign. If your subject lines are not encouraging your readers to take action and open the email, then nothing you include in the body will matter. Take some time to develop compelling and exciting subject lines for your blast emails. Keep your subject lines short, sweet, and to the point.

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Moreover, great subject lines will significantly improve your click-through rates and help you bypass spam filters. 

Test regularly

While mistakes happen, they can mess up your email blast campaigns. Once you’ve sent the email out, you can’t take it back, so make sure you regularly test to ensure that nothing could harm your results, such as a broken link.

Most email marketing software today lets you run tests before sending out the actual email blast. That way, you can test out the email design, copy, subject line and everything else in the email blast software before it hits thousands of email addresses on your list.

Whatever your tool of choice (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, ActiveCampaign), make sure to test out your emails each time before a blast.

Use responsive design

It should go without saying that all your blast email messages should use a responsive email design. With more and more people using their smartphones and other smart devices to engage with their email, an email design that works well and looks great on any device is crucial.

While blast emails might not be your go-to method for email marketing, they can be a handy way to get information out to all your email subscribers simultaneously. Most email marketing platforms nowadays have a responsive design out of the box, but it’s still worth testing how a message looks to email recipients on different devices.

Most email marketing software nowadays comes with pre-built email templates that are fully responsive. However, it’s always worth checking how the email looks on different devices before sending out messages to your entire email lists.

Clean up your lists before sending out a blast

List growth is important, but so is getting good results from your campaigns. Email marketers know that no email list stays the same forever. Some people change their emails, change jobs or simply leave the wrong address with a typo in your list.

For these cases, it’s crucial to do a validation of your contact records from time to time. A tool such as Bouncer can help you clean and validate your lists. In other words, it will scan your entire email list and show you which addresses are no longer valid and will lead to a soft or hard bounce.

Wrapping up

As email automation becomes more developed, email blasts have become a more acceptable way to get in touch with subscribers. With just a little bit of effort in email segmentation, you can get amazing results with e-blasts as your email marketing strategy.

But as always, we’ll have to warn you – do not send out any emails before verifying your addresses first. Sign up for Bouncer and power up your email strategy with clean lists of verified email addresses.

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Your free trial awaits you!

Frequently asked questions

Are email blasts legal?
Yes, if you’re sending out emails to an existing audience that gave their permission to be contacted. If you’re sending emails to a purchased list or a list of contacts that did not give you permission, then you might be in trouble.

Will email blasts hurt my email marketing performance?

When done right, no. You want to make sure you’re not sending out generic emails to large audiences. If your email blast has a purpose and some type of contact list segmentation, you can get pretty good results.

What makes a good email blast?
You need a clear purpose for the email with a strong CTA that drives action. When you’re sending out to so many people at once, your main aim is to drive sales.

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