EMAIL BLASTS

The Benefits of Email Blasts
& How to Send Them

email-blast-graphic2

Marketing professionals should never underestimate the power of email blasts. As the name suggests, the purpose of these emails is to spread awareness of your brand, services, and products to a large number of potential customers. These allow you to connect with untapped audiences far beyond your current market and build new lists of potential clients.

While there is a lot of discussion regarding inbound versus outbound tactics, we believe that both play an essential role in your marketing efforts. Inbound marketing is very popular at the moment, but outbound marketing is just as beneficial, if not more. Companies that integrate both strategies often achieve greater success than their competition.

To be effective, your outbound strategies must complement your inbound efforts. However, it is important that your email blasts are delivered in such a way that they don't come across as spam or unwanted communication. The key here is to provide your target audience with value from the very start. Your prospects will only engage with you once you have demonstrated said value and proven that your outreach efforts deserve their attention.

The ability to connect with new customers isn't the only reason to send out email blasts as part of your marketing strategy! Email campaigns are fast to launch and yield immediate results, unlike many other digital strategies. The opposite is true when it comes to content for example, where writing and editing can take days or weeks to complete, and the analytics can take months before producing any meaningful results.

It’s true that you will never build pipelines at the speed you desire if you discount outbound email marketing in your strategy.

What is an Email Blast?

An email blast, or eblast, is the act of sending an email to an entire list of contacts that you have had no prior contact with. Different from a typical inbound email or drip campaign, these are meant to get your brand into the inboxes of your potential target audience before they even know who you are. 

Not only are eblasts a great way to connect with potential prospects, they can also direct traffic to your website and help you schedule demos, sales meetings, or event sign-ups — depending on your particular goal. Once a connection has been established and these prospects have engaged with your outbound emails, they can graduate to your inbound database to proceed through your sales process.

Why You Should Send Out Email Blasts

There are a number of reasons why you should consider email blasts if you have not already. In today's competitive marketplace, getting in touch with new prospects quickly and often is essential for getting ahead.

According to OptinMonster, 99% of consumers check their email inbox every single day, so don’t waste this opportunity to find your ideal customer! With the right tools, you can even automate your email campaigns to reduce your workload.

Below are 6 additional reasons why your company should be sending outbound email blasts regularly.

1. Email Blasts Bring Qualified Leads to Your Sales Teams

Organic list building is effective but slow, further proving why utilizing both outbound and inbound strategies are important. Although there is no prior relationship, the contacts that make up your eblast list have already been identified as a good fit for your product or service. The conversions that come from email blasts will be highly-qualified leads that have already engaged with your brand and are more likely to buy.

In the end, your teams will no longer have to waste time and effort calling and corresponding with unqualified prospects. Your sales teams can now quickly fill their pipelines and focus on closing deals thanks to just a few emails.


2. Email Blasts Provide Personalization from the Start of the Relationship

Consumers prefer personalized communication as it shows you took the time to get to know them and their individual needs. For this reason, an email sent to the CEO of a tech company should receive a different email than a CEO in the manufacturing company. Personalization in the early stages is important because the customer experience matters, even if a relationship has yet to be established.

You can personalize the e-blasts you send by segmenting your contact lists wisely, using the right marketing tools, and following today’s best practices. List segmentation capabilities, personalization settings, and other features are available in many top email service providers such as HubSpot, Marketo, and Klaviyo.

3. Email Blasts Produce Cost-Effective and Quick Campaigns

Emails blasts are cost-effective campaigns that have an unlimited reach potential. Traditional marketing materials (think: printed mailers), are much more costly to produce and send out than email. In fact, sending multiple emails to a single prospect will cost much less than sending just one printed mailer. Your response rate will also be better with email.

Eblasts are also faster to produce compared to print materials. In just a few days your team can create the copy, design, and landing page for your CTA so that your email blasts can be sent as soon as the following week.

4. Email Blasts Boost Website Traffic and Analytics

Email blasts are an excellent method for sending qualified traffic to your website. Your eblast must contain a well-thought-out CTA that encourages readers to want to learn more about your company via a link to your website.

This influx in site visits will boost your analytics, improve your SEO rankings, and most importantly, create brand awareness. With the right content and calls-to-action set up on your website, you can attract a lot of leads into your funnel.

Don't wait for your target audience to find you.

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Examples of When to Send an Email Blast

Webinars and Events

Your informative webinar may promise to provide tons of value, but it needs to be seen by the right prospects in order to show them why. Email blasts are a great way to share information about upcoming webinars, conferences, and other professional events. Targeting the right audience can ensure successful attendance. 

If your company has a webinar especially useful for an audience with no prior contact, send a series of 3 messages consisting of an invitation, reminder, and follow-up email. Timing these emails correctly will further increase the number of attendees and responses.

Promotion

Self-promotion through eblasts is also a smart move. Similar to an elevator pitch, you are able to showcase what you do best and communicate how your services can directly benefit their business goals. This eblast is your best bet at engaging with potential clients who would have never found your product or service otherwise.

Announcements and News

A range of announcements and news can be shared with prospects in a single email blast. For example, potential customers in specific geographical areas may be interested in acquisitions or new territories. Or, the latest data reports and marketing insights can be shared to showcase your brand and what you do. Perhaps you send out annual data reports to your current customers and think they may also be of interest to those who have not worked with you yet. A well-placed CTA providing a landing page for an invitation or download link is helpful with these types of eblasts.

Product Launch

Utilizing email blasts to inform potential customers about a new product can be effective. Announcing a new product to a wider audience gives you more selling opportunities. New product features and pricing options might attract consumers who were in a different stage of the buyer’s journey and weren't ready to make a purchasing decision. Supplemental blog posts and product demos are excellent uses of calls-to-action in these emails.

The 7 Steps to a Successful Email Blast

Step 1: Choose an Email Service Provider

Before selecting an email service provider (ESP), know what to look for in these tools. Ideally, it should offer a simple user interface where both designers and copywriters can work in, a secure server that does not leak sensitive data, and provide tracking and automation features. You will also want to consider the size of your contact lists, as this can greatly affect the service you choose.

Among the best examples of ESP providers for large lists include Mailchimp, Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Zoho Mail, MailGun, and Postmark.

Step 2: Define Your Company's Total Addressable Market

Your company’s total addressable market, or TAM, is the overall revenue opportunity of your product or service. Based on this data, you can determine what types of email blasts to send and who to send them to. Knowing how much potential you have for sales opportunities can also help you plan the amount of emails to be sending for hitting goals.

Step 3: Get to Know Your Audience Individually

If you are trying to make a good impression, know who you are sending your email to and whether it will genuinely benefit them. Take the time to do your research on their company and role. Once you can prove that your solution is indeed relevant, locate the email addresses of the decision makers and write them directly. Sending an eblast to the wrong target audience simply wastes your time and theirs.

Step 4: Identify Your Campaign Goal

The only way to determine whether your eblast campaign is successful is by first setting goals for it. The goals for each email should be based on your TAM and what action you want the persona to take.

Base your goals on the following metrics:

  • Open rate - the percentage of recipients who open the email. Open rates give insight into how engaged subscribers are.

  • Click-through rate - this measures how many individuals clicked the links within your email. As a result, you will have an idea of how the email is working.

  • Conversion rate - this number tells you how many specified actions were completed. The amount of form submissions on a landing page is a good example of this metric.

  • Bounce rate - a lower bounce rate is ideal, meaning a larger percentage of individuals did in fact receive your email. A high bounce rate indicates a bad list full of invalid addresses.
Step 5: Create Compelling Copy

The key to writing compelling copy is to understand your audience by knowing their pain points and motivations. Your company can help them like no one else can, so effectively communicate this to them in a way that will get their attention! Effective copy can always outperform cool design.

Step 6: Send 3-4 Email Blasts

Always send multiple emails per campaign. Create several versions of one email with different text, design, preview text, and subject lines. This gives subscribers multiple chances to engage, in case the first time didn’t make it to their inbox, they didn’t have a chance to get to it, it wasn’t the right time for them to buy, and so on.

Step 7: Track Performance and Pivot

Tracking email blast performance will tell you what’s working and what isn’t. By tracking the metrics mentioned above, you can analyze your efforts and determine where you should focus on fixing them. You can also view how individual emails contribute to campaigns and get granular feedback on the ones you are sending out.

The Do's and Don'ts of Email Marketing

Do
Prove yourself

Provide stats, credentials, and success stories as social proof. You gain trust by demonstrating the credibility to work with them. Mention well-known companies who use the same solution you're pitching, and share their results.

Do
Send to a clean list

Regularly clean your email list by removing inactive, bounced, and other non-engaged contacts. Subscribers who haven’t opened an email in at least three months or more should be removed as it’s likely they have no interest in what you are sharing. Any subscribers who mark you as spam should also be removed as they are hurting your sender’s reputation and engagement rates.

Do
Include a clear call-to-action

Don’t ruin an email with a weak call-to-action. Once you have engaged prospects with your email copy and value, direct them to the next action you want them to take. Make sure the CTA is visible and clear that it links to another step, otherwise they may skim over it. Feel free to experiment with CTA placement and color to see what your audience interacts with the most.

Do
Let readers opt out

Letting subscribers opt out of getting your emails reduces the amount of spam complaints and is another tip for keeping your list healthy. You can also be proactive and remove unengaged users before they unsubscribe to maintain your sender’s reputation.

Do
Test and review each email

Send your team members a test email before publishing it. Having more eyes on it can make editing easier and quickly catch issues with incorrect links, information, messaging, and so on. Don’t forget to send a test after each round of edits. Errors can make your company appear unprofessional in the eyes of potential customers.

Do
Make it shareable

Certain emails, such as product launches, are good-to-know bits of information for many professionals. Almost every individual you are trying to reach has their own network of contacts they regularly speak to and do business with. They may want to share it with a colleague, so make sure the email is shareable.

Don't
Use certain words in subject lines

According to HubSpot, there are just under 400 words that trigger spam filters. Avoid generic words or sayings that seem unrealistic, vague, misleading, or cliche. A few examples include:

  • “Limited time”
  • “Act fast”
  • “Get it now”
  • “Once in a lifetime”
  • “Perfect”
  • “Too good to be true”
  • “The best”
  • “Unbelievable” 
  • “Today only”
  • “Last day”
  • “Be your own boss”
  • “No obligation”
Don't
Make the copy too long

Eblasts must be no more than 200 words in length if you want to keep someone’s attention. Shorter emails are actually known to have a quicker response time. Because a relationship hasn’t been established with these contacts, you want to be respectful, get to the point, and not take up too much of their time.

Don't
Use too many graphics

Large images take longer to load, causing higher bounce rates, less conversions, or the chance of landing in spam. Many subscribers see email in plain text format by detail, so sending out an email as one designed image can also be hurtful to your numbers. Be sure it's mobile responsive, since most people nowadays use their phones for email.

Don't
Send on the wrong day

Sending an eblast on the wrong day can be detrimental to the email’s performance. Use best practices on when to send the email for the highest open rates.

For B2B, weekends are not ideal since most people are not interested in reading work-related emails at that time. Instead, send emails on days when recipients are likely checking their inboxes, such as Monday through Wednesday in the late morning or early afternoon. Never send an email in the first few days before and after a major holiday.

Don't
Skip the fact you are sending a cold email

It is normal to not receive a response to a cold email. In fact, the average response rate of a cold email is 1%. Chances are, they may not have seen the original email, it may have gone to spam, and so on. Do not give up just because they don't reply!

If recipients are not in need of your product or service, give them the option to tell you with a clear opt-out section in the email’s footer. Over the next few months, continue to send out four to seven additional emails. Note that each of these emails must provide even greater value than the last. Otherwise, there is no incentive for them to respond.

Email Marketing Services to Engage with Your Untapped Audiences

With Acceler8now, you can harness the power of full-service outbound email marketing to fill your pipeline and maximize the growth potential of your business.


As the most flexible campaign platform in the business, we enable you to run multiple campaigns simultaneously among different target markets and allocate email sends based on their response rates. Our outreach services include access to a team of marketing and sales experts, database management specialists, and copywriting professionals dedicated to helping you develop your strategy and continuously optimize your campaigns.

Our goal is to fill your pipeline with prospects you might not have reached.

Contact us to learn more about our comprehensive outreach services.
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Client Example: Webinar Email Blasts + Results

Client Background

We work with a global provider of corporate data for financial intelligence and chain risk solutions based in the DC area. The company wanted to drive registrations for an upcoming webinar on international corporate data restrictions.

Strategy

By utilizing our data tools, we targeted industries and individuals that could benefit from the webinar's content. As a result, we created four individualized email blasts to reach over 10,000 recipients over the course of a few weeks.

Results

A total of 92% of the emails were delivered successfully with a 33% click rate. The unsubscribe rate was .21%, and there were zero spam complaints. The total amount of sign-ups from these email blasts resulted in 100 additional webinar signups and over 1,000 new email contacts added into their CRM.

In conjunction with key decision makers, we created a strategy that raised awareness for the webinar that yielded better results than their inbound efforts. In turn, we have built a long-term relationship with this company and now provide them with regular email blasts, in addition to our other outreach services that generate high-quality leads for them.

Schedule a meeting on our calendar to learn more about our email blast services and what to expect from working with us.