Email blasts sometimes have a bad reputation as “spam,” but they’re making a comeback. Despite the name, email blasts aren’t about spamming your entire email list with your latest offer. Although email blasts do go out to a large number of your contacts, their aim is to reach out to a broad range of people and narrow them down into specific subsets of subscribers.
Email blasts are minimally personalized and can be a part of a one-off campaign—such as a limited-time promotion—or as a part of a campaign to segment your subscribers.
While you’re probably well-versed in why drip email campaigns are almost always a good idea, you might not know about the various uses of email blasts. Here are five reasons to use Keap and email blasts:
Quick turnaround campaigns
Email blasts can be great for campaigns where you want to make maximum impact in a short amount of time. Got a fabulous sign-up offer your prospects should know about? Blast ‘em! Want to give your loyal customers 50 percent off their subscription just because? Blast ‘em! But don’t just “blast” them. Use a conversational tone in your emails to engage your audience and start a conversation with them.
Kyle Mucha from Marketpreneurs used this technique for driving signups to events. He says, “Sending emails, on a mass level, directly from members of our sales team and using a conversational tone started conversions with people interested in our products. Not only did we in marketing see a better registration rate for our events but we also helped the sales team increase their productivity by starting conversations with people that mattered.”
Re-engage inactive subscribers
Inactive subscribers receive your emails but don’t open them or interact with them in any way. Look at this segment of your email list as opportunities. What can you do to re-engage them?
A targeted email campaign sent out to only this subset of subscribers can help you turn them into paying customers. Bob Clary from Intellibright implemented a campaign to re-engage inactive subscribers and says, “By targeting the unengaged group, we were able to offer more aggressive discounts and recapture about 6 percent of emails we would have otherwise lost.”
Don’t let these unengaged subscribers go to waste. Be sure to offer them discounts and promos to get them back into the fold of active subscribers.
Stay top of mind
Email blasts can help you stay top of mind with your customers and prospects. If you think about it, emails like newsletters, updates, and promotions, are really email blasts with a different name. They all serve the same function—to remind your prospects and customers that you’re still there.
It costs five to seven times more to acquire new customers, which is why you should do your best to retain your current customers. One way to stay in the forefront of your customer’s minds is to send email blasts to let them know you’re still there in case they need you.
Kevin Sides from ShipMonk, says they use email blasts to help retain customers and gave this pro tip: “Once we get customers to sign up our focus is solely on retaining them. We send milestone emails and rewards each time a customer reaches a certain amount of packages shipped, and we check it every few months to make sure everything is going as they've hoped.”
Learn more about customers based on their actions
Progressive profiling is the marketer’s choice for learning about their customers and prospects. This technique asks for minimal details but slowly gathers data to get a full picture of your customer or prospect. Let’s say you only asked them their email address to make signing up to your list as easy as possible. At this point, you’ve got nothing else but this email. Your next step could be to flesh this out with a three-email campaign for a new line of products.
Your first email could capture their product preference. Send your subscribers an email asking them which type of products they prefer—cat food or dog food? Men or women’s clothing? etc.
Chris Brantner, founder of CutCableToday.com, has great success with these types of email blasts. He says, “I'll send out an email about an offer or something to my entire list. Then I see who opens based on the headline, as well as who clicks what. I'll then break up those people into smaller segments and target them with a second email based on what they click. These pinpointed follow-up emails get a 60 to 70 percent open rate and a 10 to 15 percent CTR, which is high.”
These types of emails will give you invaluable insight into your current email list, and most important, it will allow you to start segmenting your list so you can place your customers and prospects into appropriate drip email campaigns for further lead nurturing.
Ask for reviews
Social proof is all-important these days. Most customers will search for online reviews of your company or products before deciding to purchase from you. The best way to bolster social proof is to gather customer reviews. You can do this by sending an email blast to long-time customers, with a discount or offer attached.
Austin Miller from Bookly says they achieved astounding results after sending out an email blast asking for reviews, with a discount attached. “Let them know, that no matter the review they leave, they will receive a discount. We recently did this, and the results were astounding—54 percent open rate, and 19 percent click-thru rate.”
As you can see, email blasts have their place alongside automated drip campaigns in the email marketing toolkit. If you’re regularly collecting new prospect and customer information, email blasts are helpful for further segmenting them so you can funnel them into your automated drip campaigns.
Remember, if you choose to use email blasts, always abide by the anti-SPAM laws, and avoid blacklists.
Vanessa Rombaut is a featured writer in various tech publications and websites. She co-authored the book "The Beginner’s Guide to CRM" and is the content manager at PieSync. PieSync connects your databases across your cloud apps so that your sales and marketing teams always have access to the most up to date prospect and customer information.
