Email blasts: What they are & how to send them in 2024

Reading Time: 12 minutes

Email blasts have become a go-to method for email marketers to reach large audiences quickly. But as the landscape shifts, so too does the way we approach mass email campaigns. 

While email blasts can be a powerful tool, if not executed properly, they risk alienating your subscribers and damaging your brand. 

So, how do you make sure your email blasts hit the mark in 2024? In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about what email blasts are, how to send them effectively, and why they may not always be the best option.

In this post:

1. What are email blasts?
2. How to send email blasts the right way
3. Email blast examples
4. Why email blasts are a risky marketing strategy
5. Are email blasts considered spam?
6. Summary

What are email blasts?

Also called mass emails, email blasts are messages sent to a large number of recipients simultaneously. They’re usually sent with little strategy or personalization. But they can be effective in collecting customer feedback, launching new products, or sharing promotional content. 

For example, you might want to let your audience know about your best holiday sales or gift packages. In that case, your best option is to send a message to your entire contact list at the same time. This message is a perfect example of letting your audience know you’re taking appointments and they deserve to pamper themselves:

How to send email blasts the right way

To send email blasts the right way, pay attention to several factors, such as the type of marketing app you use and the quality of your email lists. Doing this helps increase open rates and email engagement. 

Here’s a step-by-step process guiding you through how to create effective email blasts: 

1. Choose an email marketing app
2. Prepare your email list
3. Choose a campaign goal
4. Create and personalize content
5. Make it easy to unsubscribe
6. Send out your email blast
7. Track campaign performance

Let’s discuss each of these steps in detail:

1. Choose an email marketing app

To send email blasts efficiently, you’ll need reliable email software. 

Omnisend offers all the tools marketers need to configure email blasts to their preferences. It provides a wide range of pre-made templates that can easily be customized for mass email campaigns. 

Omnisend is great for email blasts because it also provides other features that help with mass campaigns, such as the campaign booster and A/B testing. With these features, you can automatically resend emails to recipients who haven’t interacted with them, while A/B testing allows you to create compelling subject lines that increase open rates.

Some other features that make Omnisend great for sending email blasts include highly customizable email templates, integration capabilities, and analytics and reporting. 

With Omnisend, you can easily set up automated email blasts and create emails and campaigns tailored to reflect your brand while conveying your message effectively.

Here are some Omnisend features that help you send effective email blasts:

1. Automation: Save time when you send email blasts by using Omnisend’s automation feature to create workflows (or use the pre-built ones) for key customer touchpoints 
2. Email templates: This platform provides you with a wide library of customizable email templates, including pre-built messages and subject lines 
3. A/B testing: Its split testing features help you determine which subject lines and email messages get the most responses from your recipients
4. Integration: Omnisend integrates with a wide range of ecommerce platforms, allowing you to easily sync contact information from various platforms and send email blasts to a larger group of recipients 
5. Analytics and reporting: The analytics and advanced reporting features in Omnisend give you insight into the performance of your email blast campaigns, including how trends change over time

Omnisend has a 4.7 rating on Shopify and a 4.5 rating on G2. You can send 500 emails per month with Omnisend for free (more pricing info). 

Learn more about Omnisend or talk to us.

2. Prepare your email list

Having an email list is a vital aspect of your email marketing campaign. Taking these steps to prepare your email list before you launch your email blast campaign can make it more effective:

• Build your email list: You want to have as many people on your email list as possible before launching your email campaign, so you’ll need to work on building an email list of quality subscribers with an interest in your products or services. Doing this early will give you time to troubleshoot the subscriber collecting process and get more people signing up.
• Manage your email list: Once you have a respectable email list, make sure you practice proper email list management. This requires you to go through and clean your email list regularly, removing any suspicious or inactive emails that might negatively affect your campaign.
• Use segmentation: Your email blast list may consist of all your subscribers, as this is typically how email blasts work, but you’ll still need to create a segment for them, to ensure it includes everyone you want to receive the notification. At the same time, you can also eliminate those you don’t want the email blast to go to.

3. Choose a campaign goal

Every email blast campaign should be associated with a specific, measurable goal. For example, your email blast campaign goals could be to:

• Improve email open rates by 25% within the next four weeks
• Decrease the number of unsubscribes by 50%
• Improve click-through rate by 25% within the next month
• Increase conversion rate by 10%
• Build brand awareness by increasing social media followers by 25% within the next quarter 

The open rate, for example, might be the most relevant metric for a welcome message intended to bring users to your website for more information.

On the other hand, the open rate won’t be as meaningful for a cart abandonment email that’s all about generating sales. In that case, you’ll probably be more interested in the percentage of users that go on to make a purchase after receiving the message.

4. Create and personalize content

At this point, it’s time to assemble your email and develop an attractive design that will push readers toward the action you identified as your campaign goal. Your email software should make it easy for you to customize messages to your needs.

Keep in mind that a single message might contain several different design elements, such as text, images, and calls to action. It’s important to A/B test each aspect of your emails one at a time in order to fully optimize your content.

Personalization is one of the most critical aspects of a successful email blast. For example, emails with personalized subject lines are opened nearly 20% more often than emails with a generic subject line.

Similarly, Omnisend’s research data indicates that consumers are 2.6 times as likely to place an order when they’re shown product recommendations based on their unique purchase history. Implementing more personalization will help you create content that’s more relevant to each reader’s experience.

5. Make it easy to unsubscribe

Leaving users on their list when they’re no longer interested in your content will hurt your performance in every marketing metric and reduce your credibility as an email sender.

With that in mind, the unsubscribe option should always be easy for readers to find.

Consumers unsubscribe from newsletters for a number of reasons. For example, users might feel that they’re getting too many emails from you or that they’re not interested in a specific type of message.

However, you should also give them the option to adjust their preferences without leaving your list entirely. Instead of unsubscribing, they may simply reduce their desired frequency or opt out of a certain type of message while staying engaged with the rest of your content.

6. Send out your email blast

At this point, your content is ready and you could potentially start sending your message, but don’t rush just yet. There are a couple more things to consider.

First, you need to identify the perfect time and day of the week to trigger your email blast. 

Timing is an important part of the email marketing puzzle and can affect your open rates and chances of reaching the top of subscribers’ inboxes. The best times for opens and clicks are between 10 a.m. and noon or 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., Monday through Friday. But optimal timing may vary by industry and email content.

One more thing to pay attention to is grouping your email blasts into batches. This approach can improve deliverability and engagement rates. By splitting your list into smaller groups, you reduce the risk of being flagged as spam, as ISPs see a lower volume of emails sent at once.

Sending in batches also allows you to monitor performance in real-time, making it easier to adjust content or timing for better results. Additionally, batching helps avoid overloading your servers, ensuring smoother delivery and higher open rates.

Once you figure out the timing and group your email blast, send yourself a test email, check if everything is in order, and press send.

7. Track email campaign performance

Every message you send gives you new information that can be used to optimize future campaigns. With the right email marketing application, you’ll have access to detailed information about the results of each email blast.

For example, let’s say you’re generating a strong click-through rate but having trouble turning those visitors into buyers. That’s a good indication that users are interested in the content but are running into an issue on your site that prevents them from completing their order.

A/B testing, also known as split testing or multivariate testing, is a critical element of successful campaign analytics. In an A/B test, you’ll have the chance to test out different variants of each ad and compare their results on various marketing metrics.

Email blast examples

Knowing the basics of email blasts is a good start, but looking at examples can give you a better idea of how these emails can fit into your marketing strategy. Let’s look at how email blasts might look in real campaigns and what others are doing to promote their businesses to a broader market:

1. Allbirds

This message from Allbirds is a perfect example of a sleek, professional email blast. It’s designed to encourage conversions with a hero image of the flagship product and a link to their online store. While Allbirds offers a product description, the description is short enough for readers to scan quickly.

With that being said, this email may lean too far toward images rather than text. The recommended ratio is roughly 80% text to 20% images for optimal email deliverability.

It’s acceptable to go a little higher than 20% if you have strong visuals, but we recommend keeping images below half of the total content of each message.

2. Crello

For companies that provide services to other businesses, explaining what those services are and how they offer a unique value can be a major challenge. 

In this email, Crello explains how its brand kit can help businesses develop a more distinctive brand voice and engage more effectively with their audience.

Even though this email has a lot of text, it’s split into clear sections and broken up by relevant images. Each section also comes with a link to a relevant part of the Crello website — for example, customers who are interested in a premium subscription can go directly to the site to learn more about the Pro plan.

3. Zapier

This email blast from Zapier lets customers know about a limited-time promotion of $10 for three months of its Professional Plan. This is an excellent email design example with plenty of white space and clear information about the offer. 

Note that the price of the subscription is printed in large font at the top of the message, while the end date is offset in a box so that readers know it’s a limited-time offer.

Zapier’s design might seem basic, but this approach is less likely to produce friction or make users close the message before they take the desired action. Try to err on the side of too little content rather than including so much that you distract the reader from the main point of the message.

4. Eton

For brands like Eton that value customer input and want to make its sustainability efforts known, this email blast serves as a great example of how to combine engagement with a compelling offer.

In this email, Eton asks for feedback on their sustainability agenda, showing their commitment to customer opinions. They make it easy for the recipient to participate by highlighting that the survey will take only a few minutes. 

The email, while having a simple design, is visually striking. The background image of a model in nature enhances the sustainability theme without overwhelming the text. Sections are clearly defined, and each is accompanied by a direct call to action like the “Start the Survey” button. Customers are further incentivized to participate with a 15% discount code, leading them straight to the website.

5. YETI

When you come up on major ecommerce holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Black Friday, or Valentine’s Day, you need to let customers know about your top promotions and what they should expect from you in terms of shipping and returns. 

In this message, YETI gives customers the option of getting free shipping in time for Father’s Day for items customers purchase by a certain date.

This email already offers straightforward information, but it makes it even easier for readers to shop by providing relevant product categories.

Why email blasts are a risky marketing strategy

Email blasts had their place in the spotlight in the early years of the web when most email marketers had a single goal in mind — to reach as many people as possible. These days, however, email blasts can do you more harm than good.

That’s because they don’t follow the STP model (short for Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning), which is one of the pillars of modern email marketing.

1. Email blasts are not segmented

Segmentation is the very first step of the STP marketing model.

Email segmentation involves splitting up your email subscribers into smaller lists based on a variety of criteria to send more relevant messages to smaller groups. These criteria can include:

• Demographics
• Behavior
• Location
• Income
• Interests
• And many more

With unsegmented email blasts, however, you’re sending to everyone — and if you’re sending to everyone, you’re sending to no one. 

For example, let’s say you’re running an online clothing store and want to send announcement emails about new luxury dress arrivals. Sending this email to all of your customers, regardless of their buying ability, would not only be ineffective but could also alienate your lower-income subscribers.

However, segmentation increases the effectiveness of your emails because it helps you send relevant messages to your audience. 

Here’s an illustration to show how segmentation works:

2. Email blasts are not targeted

Once you create different segments within your email list, you can then devise different marketing strategies according to the tastes of your target audiences within each segment. This way, your customers will feel more valued and will convert more easily.

In order to target your email blast campaigns, you need to be able to tag your subscribers based on their experiences and how they interact with your products or services. Then, you can personalize the content of your emails according to customer data.

Email blasts don’t meet the requirements for targeted marketing, so personalizing your messages isn’t possible when you’re email blasting.

3. Email blasts don’t nurture customer loyalty

If you want loyal customers, your email blast campaigns need to be engaging and consistent. Nobody likes to get free-for-all emails out of nowhere, and these messages usually find their way to the spam folder in seconds.

If you want your brand to thrive, you should establish positive, emotional connections with your customers. Email blasting your entire email list once in a blue moon usually has the opposite effect:

• No emotional connection
• Resistance to unsolicited emails
• Damage to the brand due to lack of sending schedule

Are email blasts considered spam?

Some people perceive email blasts as spam because they lack personalization or the proper segmentation they need. But this doesn’t make them spam.

Here’s an expert quote shedding more light on this:

Summary

With the right email marketing strategy, you can reach a wider audience and convert more of your email recipients to customers. Using email blasts as part of your marketing strategy can help you reach a large audience, but you need to handle this type of email with care.

Sending too much content or too many emails that don’t connect with your customers can turn them away from your brand. Having just the right timing and running tests on your email blast performance can help you manage your marketing campaign and make sure it’s providing the best return.

Know your marketing goals and analyze your results so you know what’s working and what isn’t. Don’t be afraid to make changes to get the results you’re after.