What is an email blast?
We refer to an email blast when we send an email to the entire list of subscribers.
Also known as email broadcast.
The email blast usually provokes this reaction for the receiver:
Let’s take a look at how we can avoid this.
Why would you want to send an email blast?
Usually to announce something. Will this announcement be useful for your users or only serve your company’s goal?
If it the latter, the email blast is a bad idea.
A new product, a promotion, a company change, a company advertising campaign… All of these are good email ideas but not as an email blast to your whole subscriber list.
Pro tip: a broadcast email can be a good opportunity to segment your subscribers. E.g. the ones who opened it, clicked or did any specific action. You can also give them a choice between two call-to-actions in the email.
Every other email should be sent automatically based on the user’s actions.
Why should you not send an email blast to your email list?
Because you care about your delivery rate.
When you send an email to your entire list, you are most likely going to send to inactive email addresses. Or worst to spam traps.
Every time you send en email with your ESP, you are using your IP and every subscriber’s action with this IP, positive or negative will have an impact. So you want to focus on the positive action.
The most direct thing your users can do is to unsubscribe because they’ll be like: why the hell am I receiving this email? And worst, they’ll mark it as spam.
If you are familiar with the email quality score, you know that this email blast will have a terrible impact on your quality score.
Plus, some ESP are charging per number of emails sent like MailChimp. You might consider more AWeber plans as they all include unlimited emails.
So let’s rethink the email blast
If you want to send an email blast that’s fine, but make sure that your users will really benefit from it.
How to make sure they benefit from it? The content should be valuable for the user.
In one word, you’ll achieve this through segmentation.
Therefore if you segment the list, can we still call it an email blast? 
Which segment?
Your audience can be segmented in many ways. With explicit and implicit data.
The data that a user is giving you upfront and the data you collect about the user.
This is the best way to start segmenting your list and avoid sending the same email to everyone.
For example, a travel company could segment based on
- The user’s age [explicit]
- The user’s gender [explicit]
- The user’s location [explicit]
- The destination a user has searched [implicit]
- The dates of the trip [implicit]
- The length of the trip [implicit]
I won’t go too much into details but if you want to learn more about it, I cover segmentation with more than 30 minutes of video content in my email marketing course. Including a walkthrough in Mailchimp and Drip.
Once your segments are well defined you should be able to answer this question before sending an email blast:
[thrive_highlight highlight=’default’ text=’dark’]Would this email makes sense for this segment? [/thrive_highlight]
Now go ahead send your email blast to the users who will benefit from it. Not everyone.
