What is an Email Blast?
Finding the best way to communicate with customers and leads is one of the keys to being successful in any kind of business. Sending emails is a highly convenient way of doing this. Yet, there are also some potential drawbacks when doing this that you need to be aware of.
Email blasts used to be an extremely popular marketing technique. Is this still something that it is worth doing, though? Let’s take a look at what this is all about and how relevant it still is in modern marketing.
The Basics
An email blast is fairly simple to define. It is a single message that you send out by email to a large group of people. Everyone on your marketing list gets the same email in the same way and at the same time when you do this.
If you were working in marketing in the past then you have no doubt sent some of these out. When email marketing first became possible, everyone was really excited about reaching out to so many people so easily. No matter what you do for a living or what your interests are, you have probably received a few emails of this type in your inbox too.
They are generally pretty easy to spot. Since this is a message going out to a lot of people, it won’t go into specifics. It might cover something that the recipient is genuinely interested in, but probably only in very general terms.
What’s Good About Email Blasts?
This is a highly effective way to get information out to a lot of people at one time. If you have something that you want to send to a number of recipients then it doesn’t really make sense to write individual emails for each of them.
In this way, your marketing team can use their time more effectively. There are undoubtedly going to be times when sending out an email like this is a smart way to work. Yet, this approach isn’t without its drawbacks.
What’s Wrong with Email Blasts?
The first issue a lot of people have is with the name. The term email blast just sounds quite aggressive and not very pleasant.
In fact, it sounds pretty much like what it is. Getting out a lot of information to as many people as possible in a kind of hit and miss strategy. It isn’t very subtle and it can annoy recipients.
The trend now is to call this activity an email campaign. It might not seem like a big difference but changing the name might also help you to change the way that you look at it.
It is also fair to say that email blasts tend to be unfocused and untargeted. These days, we expect to see personalized emails that are relevant. As mentioned earlier, you are almost certain to have received messages like this in the past. However, you probably get a lot less of them now than you once did.
This is because brands are increasingly turning away from email blasts. They are doing this simply because this approach is no longer considered to be effective.
What Is a Better Strategy?
Once we ditch the term email blast and call it an email campaign, we can start to consider what else might be better to do. The idea of sending out marketing emails certainly isn’t dead, but it is worth taking a look at how you can connect with your customers and potential clients in a better way.
This means forgetting about sending out one message to all of your leads. You should focus instead on personalizing and customizing. People want to think that you have something that is just right for them, rather than feeling as though they are just another name on a list.
The starting point for this is with good email marketing software that lets you adopt a targeted approach. You will want to prioritize the leads that are worth spending time on. Then you will want to mention their name and generally make them feel as though you are conversing directly with them.
Some marketing tools will also let you split your leads up in different ways. So you can talk to them differently depending up their age, location, or other important factors. This will help them to feel as though you are talking directly to them.
Track and Improve
The old email blasts were usually sent with more hope than anticipation. The sender would cross their fingers and hope against hope that they would get a reply from at least a few of the recipients. A lot of the time, they would never know how many messages actually got opened or read.
These days, it is easy to track your success rate in terms of metrics such as how many people opened the mail or clicked on the link contained in it. This is a vital part of the process, as it lets you improve your strategy as needed.
Conclusion
Email blasts haven’t disappeared altogether. The idea of sending your message to a large group of recipients can still work, but it has evolved so that you can now do it in a better, more efficient way.