In this article, we’ll dive into the email blast approach, what it is, and what benefits it brings to the table. We’ll also fuel your inspiration by bringing the best examples from well-known businesses that use email blasts on a regular basis.
Sometimes, in business, there are situations when the audience needs to get information promptly, and creating a separate email campaign with all the nuances is too long and expensive. You need a quick and effective solution that will not take a lot of resources and time but it will get the job done. Email blast is exactly what you need. In this article, we will look at what it is and what benefits this email marketing strategy brings. We will also give a few examples to spur your creativity.
What is an email blast?
When breaking down the concept of email blasts, it’s always worth starting with the basics. An email blast (also known as a broadcast email) is a single message sent to a large group of subscribers at once (often the entire audience). Think of it as using a megaphone to reach hundreds, thousands, or even millions of inboxes at once to convey information. That’s the whole point of email blast campaigns.
Email blasts have several special traits that distinguish this approach from familiar email marketing campaigns:
- an email blast is made to reach a wide audience quickly as you send one email to your whole list of email subscribers;
- an email blast is designed to convey time-sensitive information when something is happening now, and there is no time to prepare a full-fledged email marketing campaign;
- an email blast is a mass email focused specifically on quantity over quality of recipients.
Best scenarios for using an email blast
Those are pretty nice traits, but they sound a bit vague about when to use them. Email blasts have several scenarios when they work best:
Immediate reports
The first and most common use case for an email blast is when there is a global issue that you need to communicate to your user base. For example, your servers are down for maintenance, and you need to immediately inform your users and offer action. The same goes for announcing updates.
Announcements
Announcements of big events, milestones, updates, and collaborations are great content on which to base your blast emails. Anything that your audience needs to know about but doesn’t require meticulous personalization is fuel for blast email campaigns.
Mastering announcements is a tricky task, so we’ve prepared a dedicated article to help you out.
Damage control
Things don’t always go smoothly in business, and damage control is the right thing to do when you make a mistake. Email blasts are a great tool to get your point across, apologize, take a stand, or offer compensation to all your users. This is appropriate if your business has recently gone viral due to controversy, there has been a massive backlash against your services, or you want to debunk rumors.
So, whether you’re a small business or a large corporation with tons of marketing automation in place, email blast is a great email marketing tool for you.
Email blast benefits
Email blast campaigns seem good on paper. But why do you need to spend your email marketing efforts creating these marketing emails? We’ve gathered several benefits you will receive from adopting the email blast approach.
Easy to set up
A full-fledged email marketing campaign is a whole chain of preparations, segmentation, and creation of relevant content, and all this for several consecutive emails. Sounds labor-intensive, doesn’t it?
Email blasts are much easier to set up since you only need to prepare one email without looking at the audience selection, verified content, and so on. Your task is to convey information to as many people as possible in the shortest possible time.
Wide reach and visibility
As we have already said above, standard email campaigns and their content are always based on a certain segment of the target audience and their preferences. All of this widens your field of activity and the number of affected audiences. By discarding these requirements, you will significantly increase your reach and visibility among the audience.
Cost savings
This benefit follows from the previous ones. Instead of a whole chain of emails with a long creation cycle, you have just one that requires less time to create. Less time spent—less resources needed for one campaign. Plain and simple.
Straightforward scheduling
If you are planning to send an email blast, you can worry less about precise scheduling. You can send it at any time since you are sending it to a large audience, and you do not need to adjust to time zones and so on. However, you should not completely ignore the schedule. Email blasts are subject to the same rules as regular emails, and you should choose the day of sending them wisely.
Together with GetResponse, we have researched the best day and time to send emails to achieve maximum click-through rates, ways to create a subject line that grabs attention, and ways to avoid the spam folder. Check our results in a full white paper.
Email blast examples
Now, it’s time to have a quick dive to see how the email blast approach is doing on famous brands’ email marketing services and how wisely they choose occasions to turn to email blast services.
Limited-time offer email blast
You decided to throw your audience a party and give everyone a limited-time offer that benefits both you and them. A limited-offer email blast is your go-to if you want to reach the masses with this wonderful news. Check out how Coursera emphasizes a limited-time $1 subscription, making this figure eye-catching design-wise.
(Source: Email from Coursera)
Collaboration promotion email blast
Collaboration is one of the pillars of public relations, and the right email campaigns can fuel it. An email blast is a great way to announce your new partner, introduce them to your audience, and give a hint about what this collaboration will bring to them. Adidas often sends out such newsletters to announce collaborations with exclusive clothing lines.
(Source: Email from Adidas)
Sale promotion email blast
This email blast template is perfect for promoting big sales tied to famous occasions like Black Friday, Christmas, Cyber Monday, and so on. It’s vital to tell your audience that you are about to cut down prices or present a new product line for the occasion, so a blast email is the perfect tool for that.
(Source: Stripo template)
Big update email blast
Bringing good news with big updates for your business and product is one of the main purposes of email blasts. Such emails do not require segmentation, as they are designed for simple notification, and it is up to the recipients to decide what to do with this information. However, a pinch of marketing should still be added, as the creators of the game EverQuest did—they added a large call to action to their blast email with an offer to play the game for which a huge update was released.
(Source: Email from EverQuest)
New contests email blast
Who’s against a little competition? What about a competition for a cash prize? This is definitely an event your audience shouldn’t miss, and it’s worth notifying as many people as possible. RenderHub sent out this email blast announcing new competitions for 3D artists who could compete for a hefty cash prize. Option to sign for the competition included.
(Source: Email from RenderHub)
Premiere email blast
Premiering hit movies, shows, and theatrical events need to be done in style and correctly. Blast emails are great for announcing such premieres. You announce it to a large number of people and invite them to watch it, and the audience decides for itself whether it is interesting or not. Such emails are often accompanied by large banners with the upcoming premiere and a bright CTA to attract clicks.
(Source: Stripo template)
News and updates email blast
If you are preparing a whole chain of exciting events, collaborations, and other occasions, you can’t do without a special digest in the form of a blast email. The well-known company SEGA sent out a selection of news and announcements to all subscribers in anticipation of a big game event. Looks like killing a surprise? We would say a hypetrain boost everyone should hop on.
(Source: Email from SEGA)
New feature email blast
An actively developing product is a source of pride and a ground for blast emails. Such emails demonstrate to your entire audience that you are not standing still, are actively improving the product, are striving to improve the user experience, and it is worth staying with you because there are still a lot of interesting and useful things for them ahead. Check out this email blast template made specifically for the IT industry, which includes a digest of new features for the product.
(Source: Stripo template)
Milestone email blast
Important milestones, dates, and events that define the history of your business should not be a holiday only for the team. Blast emails are a great tool for sharing joy with your audience. Ubisoft sent everyone the joyful news about 8 million registered players in their recent game. This is not only a great milestone wrapped in a visually appealing email but also a token of gratitude that gives each recipient a feeling that they contributed to this event. Well, do not forget about gifts for everyone in honor of this event and an invitation to pick them up.
(Source: Email from Ubisoft)
Known issues email blast
Urgent problems require urgent solutions and audience notification. When faced with unexpected difficulties, it is worth immediately using an email blast to notify your entire audience. Whether it is a product malfunction, an out-of-stock of the most popular product, or a reputational scandal, it is worth notifying your audience about the problem that you are aware of its existence and are doing everything possible to fix it.
(Source: Stripo template)
Wrapping up
Email blast is a perfect way to convey information that does not rely on the personal preferences of your audience segments. They are made to help you out in tough times when damage control is needed, on the days when you are proud of your milestones, or when you are planning to tell your recipients about big updates that are about to come. We hope that these great email blast examples will help you come up with emails that will become a trustworthy pillar of your email marketing.
