To Email Blast or Not to Email Blast

Email blasts may be one of the most contentious marketing puzzle pieces. Some swear by their effectiveness—but others deride their spammy nature and low engagement numbers. So, who's right?

Then some will tell you that email is a dying medium and not to bother.

First things first, let’s nip that pernicious myth in the bud. Email is by no means a dying technology, not even close. There are 4.25 billion active email users worldwide, and over the last four years, daily email traffic has increased by 5% yearly.

OK, so email is here to stay. What does this mean for the title question: To blast or not to blast? Would you hate us if we said, "It depends?" Let's see what the right Email Marketing approach is.

Here's our easy-to-follow, three-step process to determine if email blasts are viable for you and your unique marketing situation. Look at your current campaigns and those in development. Run them through these steps. Then, once you've gone through all the steps, you can decide whether an email blast will help you reach your marketing plan and goals.

Step 1: What is an Email Blast, anyway?

An email blast is a single email message sent to a large, unsegmented list of recipients. Isn't an email blast just a group email? What's so controversial about that? Yes and no, and we're getting to that. According to industry leader Hubspot, an email blast is also defined as:

“...a generic email message sent to a huge list of unsegmented recipients. A poster child of the spray-and-pray marketing approach, email blasts are usually considered spam.”

The keywords there are "generic” and "unsegmented." Ever wonder why that company you bought that widget from years ago is still emailing you about their other, utterly unrelated product? Because they're engaging in mass email marketing and sending an email blast to their entire database of contacts, regardless of its relevancy to any particular person or segment of their overall audience.

Compare and contrast an email blast with a curated email campaign featuring personalized messages. In a curated campaign, a new product is only advertised to people who bought the last version of that same product. Some marketers will say this is the same thing, fundamentally. We wholeheartedly disagree. Carefully personalized emails have higher engagement rates, and group emails sent to smaller, carefully segmented lists are also less likely to trigger automatic spam filters.

Each method can have a place in a well-rounded modern marketing campaign; next up, we look at pros and cons to help you decide if your campaign can benefit from an email blast.

Step 2: Consider the Pros of an Email Blast

When considering an email blast, the primary advantages relate to reach and data collection. The pros of using an email blast include:

• Extensive Reach: An email blast can reach your entire contact list at once. For major company updates or new feature announcements that apply to everyone, this broad reach is the most efficient option.
• User Feedback Collection: They are a fantastic way to collect user feedback. By sending a poll or survey to everyone, you can gather a cross-sectional sample of responses to perform a pulse check on your user base.
• Broad Data Gathering: For in-house research projects or gathering data for a whitepaper, an email blast provides an unsegmented view, which can be highly beneficial for comprehensive analysis.

Step 3: Consider the Cons of that same Email Blast

While email blasts have their uses, they also come with significant downsides, primarily related to their unsegmented nature. The cons of using an email blast include:

• Risk of Being Marked as Spam: With up to 85% of all email being considered spam, sending generic, unrequested, or irrelevant content increases the likelihood that recipients will disengage or mark your message as spam.
• Damage to Sender Reputation: Every spam complaint negatively affects your sender reputation. Sender reputation is a critical score used by ISPs and email providers to decide whether to deliver your emails, send them to the spam folder, or blacklist your domain entirely.
• Audience Irrelevance: Your contact list is not monolithic. It likely contains diverse segments, including customers of different products, investors, partners, and vendors. Sending a single message to everyone can annoy those for whom the content is irrelevant.
• Lower Engagement Rates: Personalized messages sent to segmented lists universally achieve higher open and engagement rates compared to generic email blasts. This improved engagement can, in turn, boost your sender reputation.

Bonus Step 4: Blast Best Practices

After you go through the above three steps, you may decide that the judicious use of email blasts makes sense for your current campaign. If so, follow these email blast best practices. These ensure you don’t suffer any negative consequences (like a lowered sender reputation) and can even help improve your results.

• Keep each message short and to the point.
• Be sure your subject line matches the content that follows.
• Get to your content quickly.
• Include an above-the-fold call-to-action (CTA).
• Make sure your unsubscribe option is clear and easy to find.
• Ensure your website and email formatting is mobile-friendly, as over half of all emails are read on mobile devices.

Does our slightly sarcastic "it depends" answer make more sense now? There are times and places where a well-planned email blast can do wonders for your campaigns, providing the kick-start needed to get a campaign up and running fully.

And there are times and places where even the most well-thought-out and best-intentioned blast can do nothing but turn off your customers and sour your sender's reputation for future email campaigns.

Ultimately, it has to be your call. We hope this article gave you food for thought and helps you make an informed decision when it comes time to answer the question—"to blast or not to blast."