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Email marketing is an essential component of modern digital marketing strategies. Every modern company utilizes email in some form or fashion, whether its via standard business communication or for marketing related purposes. Email blasts, in particular, can help businesses reach out to a large audience quickly and effectively. In this article, we'll be exploring exactly what an email blasts are, how you should go about structuring your email blast campaigns, and some important metrics to keep an eye on to determine the success of your email blast campaign, and how you should go about structuring future campaigns based upon this information.
The term email blast gets thrown around a lot online between email marketers and various informational articles on cold email outreach, but what exactly does this term mean? To put it simply, an email blast is the act of sending out a large amount of identical email messages to a large audience within a very short amount of time, typically within a few hours or less. These recipients can either be based upon a target audience for a companies industry or services, but can also be an indirect email blast focused on a large group of email addresses that are are not related towards one another, or gathered from various marketing funnels such as website signups or social media.
Typically an email blast is associated with actual spammers performing an email campaign, who collect recipient email addresses via web crawling, purchased contact lists, or other means of gathering addresses online in order to send out a large amount of messages within quick succession before an email address gets restricted, banned, or rendered useless due to poor deliverability, but many email marketing professionals utilize email blasts effectively to their email subscribers in order to quickly get their message or business offerings out there in front of their recipients.
Email blasts are almost universally performed via an email marketing software, an email marketing tool such as Mailstand, or dedicated email blast software due to the amount of emails that need to be sent out in a short amount of time, as setting up an email marketing campaign is the most effective way to ensure emails go out to all your subscribers in a timely and orderly fashion.
Before engaging in an email blast, its critical to plan out the entirety of your campaign prior to sending out your first message. A successful email blast campaign typically will start and finish within a few hours time, as emails during a blast tend to be sent out either all at once, or as rapidly as possible over the course of a few hours, so its important to make sure everything is 100% setup properly for your needs prior to the start of any activity. The primary details that make up email blast campaigns are
1. Configure your sending solution and prepare your sender address/domain/mail server for large volume email sending activity
2. Sourcing and verifying your list of contacts
3. Writing and perfecting your email message and subject line
4. Properly organizing and setting up your email campaign to perform this email blast.
We will go into further detail on each of these four aspects shortly, but it is important to keep this information in mind during the planning process, as in order for successful email blast campaigns to occur, you need to ensure that the content you are sending out on mass is effective at driving the results you are chasing from your campaign, as well as ensure that it will not cause any future problems for any sending solution you plan on utilizing for this task.
The first step towards any type of email activity is preparing your sending solution. For email blasts in particular, its highly suggested to have an entirely separate sending solution then that of your primary business email solution that you would utilize for low volume sending activity such as internal or external business communication, or low scale email marketing activity (Such as sending 30 or less highly focused, individualized email messages per day to a hand chosen group). The reason for this is that due to the nature of how email providers view sending activity and determine deliverability. Large scale email activity in a short amount of time is very commonly associated with spammer activity, and if a providers detection software views your email blast activity as such, you will most likely be landing in the spam folder of your recipients at an extremely high volume, rendering your outreach pointless as it will ruin any initial contact you may have with a recipient (as they will not see it in their primary inbox).
For this reason, its highly suggested to create an entirely new sender domain and mail server setup for any type of email blast activity, as having an entirely separate setup that is not associated to any critically important sending solution for your business will allow you to freely perform sending activity without the worry of any unexpected delivery issues following you into the future.
For any sender domain you register for email blasting, they all should be setup in exactly the same way as your primary business sending solution, both DNS and site wise. Creating landing pages for sender domains or setting up 301 and 401 redirects back to your primary website will add legitimacy to your outgoing messages in case any recipient visits this specific sender domain. If you are just starting outreach for a brand new business without a primary business site yet, utilizing a landing page builder to get a site up would also be a great alternative, as recipients would be less likely to engage positively with a message from an email blast campaign if there is not any direct way to discover more information regarding your company.
In order for any type of email blast to occur, you will need a large amount of contact information and email addresses to send your messages out towards. For any company's email marketing efforts, the primary audience of your email campaigns should be focused upon companies or individuals that match your businesses ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile (ICP) essentially is a set of criteria for a potential customer that would make them the best fit for your product. This can range from where this target customer is located, what type of position they have, their spending habits, virtually any type of aspects of an individual or company that would be likely to be large spenders for your offerings. With mass emails, you realistically do not want to waste the time nor effort on reaching out to individuals who would be unlikely to purchase or utilize your offerings, so its important to spend the time performing your research on who is an ideal fit for your business before drafting up your email message.
The best way to gather contact information to utilize for an email campaign is dependent on the type of business you operate, but generally for the most reliable deliverability and best chances at success, you would want to be utilizing addresses gathered via a signup form such as a newsletter or informational list. Email addresses gathered via this process would be known as single opt-in addresses, meaning that the owners of these addresses have willing provided their information to you in order to receive email messages at a future date. Single opt-in and double opt-in email addresses tend to have the highest deliverability and open rates compared to other means of gathering information, so if possible you would want to create a lead generation funnel for your business prior to performing any email blast campaigns, as it can only help to improve your outreach efforts.
If you do not have any type of lead generation funnel for your business currently and are trying to get off the ground, the best approach to building up a contact list would be to utilize a prospecting tool such as Apollo to gather highly specific contacts based upon your ICP, or utilize a lead generation service to gather a highly detailed list on your behalf. Email marketing campaigns are only as effective as the information you are basing them off of, so by utilizing either a prospecting tool or lead generation agency you can ensure that all recipients of your email blast match the exact audience of your email marketing strategy.
Once you have your contact list prepared, it is also important to remember to run every single address through an email verification service such as Verifalia or Neverbounce to make sure that they are addresses that are able to receive mail, and are still valid. After validating a list, any email addresses that come up as invalid should immedietly be tossed, as for any email blast to be successful you need to minimize any potential for email bounces. This applies for all email outreach in general, but for cases where you are planning on performing tens or hundreds of email sends within an extremely short amount of time, too many bounces within a short timeframe can trigger detection systems put in place my email providers to monitor for spammer activities. These providers monitor for unsolicited emails being sent out to recipients, so even if an email you acquired via a website signup or another lead generating sales process was done so through legitimate means, it could be mis-interpreted as spammer activity and put your email blast campaign to a halt.
For any email campaign to be effective, you need to come up with a compelling email marketing message and subject line for your email subscribers. When you begin organizing your email blast campaign, its important to find an email blast service that will allow you to perform the sending volumes you actually want to achieve throughout the duration of your campaign. For these email blast services, its important to make sure that they provide the ability to allow customization for every email message that will be going out to recipients. Dynamic content you can utilize for each email address such as a full name, job title, company name, company location, or any other specific information you are able to gather will help to capture a recipients attention and improve the click through rate of a campaign.
The subject line utilized for your email blast message is arguably one of the most important aspects of your campaign, regardless of your target audience or industry since this will be the first thing the vast majority of your recipients will see once your message goes live. For this reason, you want to make sure your subject line is concise, and to the point, while also making sure your subject line is still relevant to the main selling point of your message content.
It is important to remember that personalizing your outgoing messages as much as possible can only help to improve your open rates and the overall engagement of your campaign. Additionally, it's important to keep in mind the CAN-SPAM Act regulations when creating your email blasts, as non-compliance can result in fines and damage to your brand's reputation. By maintaining these recommended practices throughout the research and development process of your campaign, this will allow you to maximize your reach and engagement with your subscribers.
While crafting the message for your email blast campaign, it is also important to be sure to avoid any negative keywords that may have an association towards the language that active spammers utilize for their scam campaigns. Software Pundit has a fantastic article that covers a vast majority of the most common keywords that can be associated with spammer activity that may lead to your outgoing messages being blocked by spam filters, so as you are crafting your message I would be sure to go over their list of negative keywords to be sure to avoid utilizing any language that may cause confusion for the email providers of your recipients.
When structuring your email blast campaign, its important to consider the abilities of the email sending tool you are utilizing in order to determine what information you should include or not. A typical email blast service will offer multiple options for organizing the structure of your email message to specific contacts, including adjusting relevant information based upon the available content you have on your email list as well as giving you the ability to target certain groups of contacts at specific times (If you have time zone information available on specific recipients).
It's important to keep in mind how crucial email deliverability is for any type of email campaign, whether its for an email blast or a general cold email campaign. Ensuring that your email blasts are not flagged as spam is critical for the lifespan of your sending solution, as well as the effectiveness of your actual email campaigns.
To create effective email campaigns, it's essential to segment your list of subscribers and send targeted email blasts to specific groups based on their interests or behaviors. This will increase the relevancy of your emails and improve engagement with your subscribers. When structuring your email campaign, consider how you want to organize your subscribers, such as by demographics, past purchase behavior, or website interactions depending on the subject of your campaign and the purpose of your activity. With B2B sales tools such as Apollo or ZoomInfo, they typically will offer this additional information alongside direct contact information, so be sure to export and source this information if you decide to go this route to gather your contact information. If you are utilizing information gathered in house from your business, adding additional information fields to a sign up page can also help greatly with ensuring you are maximizing your chances at success with outreach.
When scheduling email delivery, it's crucial to consider the timing of your email blasts for maximum impact. Think about when your subscribers are most likely to check their email and engage with your content. Experiment with different send times and days to see what works best for your audience. Additionally, when crafting your email subject lines, make sure they are attention-grabbing and provide value to your subscribers. By following these best practices for setting up your email campaigns, you can create effective email blasts that will engage your subscribers and drive results for your business.
Timing is critical when it comes to how effective any email blast campaign is. Your target audience should receive your email at a time when they are most likely to read it. This means scheduling your email blasts to go out during working hours, preferably between 11 am to 2 pm, in their respective time zones. To execute a large-scale email blast, you will need a reliable email blast service that can send out your emails as quickly as possible. Using an email marketing tool can be a great solution to help schedule email delivery and send an email blast at the optimal time.
In addition to timing, the frequency of email blasts is also important. You don't want to send too many mass emails to your subscribers, as this can result in a high unsubscribe rate. On the other hand, not sending enough emails during a campaign could lead to your subscribers forgetting about your brand entirely. To strike the right balance, it's important to create segments in your email list to ensure that you are sending targeted email blasts to different groups of subscribers. This way, you can control the frequency of your email blasts and avoid overwhelming your subscribers with too many emails.
To ensure successful email blasts, you should also use a blast service that can handle large-scale email campaigns. A reliable email blast service can send email blasts quickly, ensuring that your emails are delivered promptly to your subscribers. Additionally, these services can also help improve email deliverability rates, ensuring that your emails do not end up in your subscriber's spam folders. Overall, by choosing a reputable email blast service, you can send email blasts with confidence, knowing that your emails are reaching your subscribers in a timely manner.
Timing and frequency are critical elements to consider when sending out email blasts. Use an email marketing tool to schedule email delivery and send an email blast at the optimal time, and create segments to control the frequency of your email blasts. Partner with a reliable email blast service to send email blasts quickly and improve email deliverability rates. By following these best practices, you can maximize the effectiveness of your email blast campaigns and reach a wider audience.
When analyzing and measuring the success of your email blasts, it's important to keep track of key metrics such as open rates, click through rates, and unsubscribes. By analyzing these metrics, you can gain valuable insights into how your email blasts are performing and what changes you can make to improve their effectiveness in the future. This is especially important for existing customers, as you want to ensure that you're not bombarding them with unsegmented email blasts that aren't relevant to their interests. Many email services offer this type of tracking by default, but if you wish to keep track of this type of user engagement outside of your sending provider, pixel tracking services such as PastePixel can allow you track engagement on all outgoing mail from an address, whether you are utilizing an automation service or directly sending out mail.
The primary reason why keeping track of your metrics during an email blast campaign is to have an understanding of how your audience is actually reacting and engaging with your messages. For instance, if you were to send out 10,000 emails in a given day to an audience you believe to be ideal customers for your product or service, tracking open rates and the amount of recipients that actually click on any link contained within an email message can give you an idea on if that group of 10,000 recipients are actually ideal customers for your product. Low clickthrough rates (If primary inbox placement for outgoing messages is consistent) typically is an indication that the recipient does not care enough about a given message, and would rather just delete it and move on with their day as opposed to actually opening up this message to see what is contained within.
If you are noticing low open rates or click through rates from an email blast, generally this would warrant a re-evaluation either of the content and subject line of your outgoing message, as well as double checking that the audience you are reaching out towards are actually individuals who may potentially be interested in your offerings. For a contact list gathered in house, it is safe to assume they are an ideal audience for an email blast due to the user manually entering in their email address relating towards your offerings, but for any type of contact list gathered from a B2B contact source such as Apollo, it may warrant you taking a closer look at exactly what you define your ICP as, and what search criteria you are utilizing for gathering this contact list to begin with.
Don't panic! Take a step back and analyze your campaign metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates, to understand where you can make improvements for your next email blast. It's also important to make sure your email list is properly segmented and your message is relevant to your audience.
Most email marketing tools provide analytics that allow you to track click-through rates. This information can help you determine what content is resonating with your audience and can inform future email campaigns. You can also add tracking parameters to your links and track them in Google Analytics.
Yes! By adding tracking parameters to your links, you can track email campaigns in Google Analytics. This will allow you to see how email campaigns are contributing to your website traffic, conversions, and revenue.
It depends on your campaign goals and audience preferences. If you have multiple messages to convey, it may be better to break them up into multiple emails to avoid overwhelming your subscribers. However, if you have a single, clear message to communicate, it may be more effective to send a single message.
To avoid being flagged as spam, make sure your subject line and message content are relevant to your audience and avoid using spam trigger words. You can also ask subscribers to add your email address to their address book or whitelist to increase deliverability.
Absolutely! Sending a test email to yourself or a small group of colleagues can help you catch any formatting issues or errors before sending to your entire email list. This can help ensure a successful email blast.
Email blasts are an effective way for businesses to quickly and efficiently reach a large audience. To have a successful email blast campaign, it is important to properly plan and execute every step of the process. This includes configuring a separate sending solution, sourcing and verifying contacts, writing effective email messages and subject lines, and organizing the email campaign. By taking the time to properly prepare and execute an email blast campaign, businesses can increase their reach and drive successful results. It is important to note that while email blasts can be a valuable tool, they should be used responsibly and ethically to avoid being viewed as spam by recipients.