What is an Email Blast?

Chapter 01: Email Blast

What Is an Email Blast?

Emails aren’t just reserved for communication between friends and family. In fact, the majority of emails that customers receive are known as email blasts, and are the complete opposite of one-to-one messages.

An email blast, also known as an email broadcast, is when when you send a single email to a group of customers or prospects all at once. Instead of direct communication between two people, you deliver your message to hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously. For example, you may send an email blast to announce a new feature or to promote a limited-time offer.

Are Email Blasts a Good Strategy?

Email blasts offer flexibility and scale. Without them, many small businesses might not even do email marketing due to the manual nature of one-to-one emails.

However, not all email blasts are created equal. Just because you can email your whole database at once doesn’t mean you should.

Email blasts can be a powerful strategy when carefully planned and executed. Here are three tips to ensure your blasts are a success:

Use personalization: Recipients shouldn’t see your message as a generic email blast. To them, it should look and feel like a customized email, so use custom fields in your emails to add an extra layer of personalization. For example, you could pull in information like first name to enhance your greeting.
Get to know your subscribers: You don’t always have to send an email blast to the largest group of users and many times, you shouldn’t. Instead, get to know your subscribers and segment them based on behavior, engagement, interest, or preferences. For example, send an email blast to users who signed up in the past two weeks or email customers who attended a webinar.
Always be testing: There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to email blasts, so conduct A/B testing to see what copy, colors, and images resonate the most. You could test things like subject line, banner image, button size and color, email layout, and more.

How to Create an Email Blast

Emails are so much more than the words on a screen. In order for email blasts to truly be successful, you need to have a proper plan in place before you start building the email itself.

Here are five steps to creating an email blast:

Think about your goals: What do you want to accomplish with this email? Do you want to generate a certain number of signups or sales? Do you want to drive traffic to a certain page? Define your goals before you create your email to help guide your messaging.
Find a marketing automation tool: Choose a tool that allows you to automate and personalize communications, build emails, and modify based on performance. You also want software that integrates with your CRM, so you can keep all customer information and activities in one place.
Create the email: Now it’s time to build out the email itself. Your email will be comprised of a subject line, body copy, one or more images, and a CTA. Perhaps the most important element is the subject line, which dicates whether your message will even be opened or not. When writing subject lines, make sure to keep them short (50 characters or less), be clear and not clever, and avoid stop words like “urgent,” “cash,” or “millions,” which can trigger spam filters.
Choose the send list: Unless your message is truly relevant to your entire customer base, you should be segmenting your lists. You can segment your leads and prospects any way you want, choosing criteria like email behavior, purchase behavior, demographics, or preferences.
Measure results: Once you’ve sent your email, wait three to five days before measuring the results. Make sure to track data like open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribes. If you ran an A/B test, this is also the time to determine the winner and document your learnings for future use.

How Keap Can Help

How can you create these email blasts at scale, without starting from scratch and repeating the same process each time?

Keap, small business client management, appointment, and invoicing/payment software, helps you get daily work done and deliver personalized, reliable services. Your clients want to feel like you just “get” them and are responsive to their needs, and this feeling carries over to email as well. Your email blasts should create a personal, relatable experience for your users.

Keap can help. You can choose from a gallery of email templates or create your own. Then, you can edit the text, images, buttons, and more, and even A/B test elements of your email (like subject line or CTA). And, thanks to a CRM integration that stores all customer information in one place, you can easily create and segment your send list based on email behavior, company name, or job title. This allows you to better customize your campaigns to what really matters to your customers, resulting in higher email engagement and deeper relationships.

Final Thoughts

At face value, the term “email blast” can have a negative connotation. It can be associated with a lack of segmentation, testing, or customized messaging.

It’s up to us to redefine what a “blast” truly means. Instead of a blanket message sent to every single person in your database, always think about creating the most personalized experience for the recipients. You can think of a “blast” as an email sent to more than one person, but think of the email itself as a note or a letter, which will naturally force you to prioritize personalization.