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Bulk email is the act of sending an email to a large group of subscribers at the same time. It is also referred to as mass emailing or sending out an email blast.
Bulk emails are mostly generic and have minimal audience segmentation. Some examples are:
Email personalization involves customizing emails based on the personal information of the audience. You can personalize your emails by using different tactics like
75% of consumers choose retail brands with personalized customer experiences. About 50% of U.S. shoppers buy products online after brands make personalized recommendations.
Personalization is effective in increasing sales and conversions, but it’s not always easy. Nearly one-third of marketers say personalizing customers’ experiences without violating privacy is difficult.
So it comes as no surprise that most businesses don’t have the capacity to send a personalized email and instead choose to send email blasts that show every subscriber the same email. Nowadays, businesses also use direct mail postcards to connect with customers and market their business
In the last few years, email marketing has advanced a lot to include personalization for subscribers. Before sending out personalized emails, you need to figure out the answers to two questions. Let’s discuss that in detail below:
Something that has become very common to personalize emails is to include your subscriber’s first name in the subject line or at the start of the email.
To move further with personalization, ask yourself the following questions:
If you are just starting out, you can send broadcast emails and then use the data from that to personalize future emails.
If you want to personalize your mass emails, make sure every person on the list is at the right stage in the customer lifecycle to take the appropriate action.
If you are sending out mass emails, segment them based on the audience’s demographics. If it is about an event in a particular city, you need to make sure that you are sending mass emails to people only in that specific city.
When it comes to personalization, you need to learn all about your audience. The information they give you is the first step towards segmenting your contacts and understanding what kind of content they want to see.
You can start with basic information, like:
You can get this information from opt-in forms and ask your customers for the data to personalize future communication with them.
Your focus should be on timing and relevance as discussed above. Consider what form a person is filling out and where they are in the customer lifecycle. If they are subscribing to your newsletter, you may not need much more than their email address.
But if you want to immediately personalize your emails, you can add additional fields to your forms.
As I mentioned above, personalization using the name of the subscriber is pretty common. Oftentimes, the name is used in the subject line and email body. It can also be used in the “To” section of the email. Using a contact’s name makes an email feel more personal and gives an impression that this email was intended for the contact. It’s a great way to grab the attention of your subscribers and get higher open rates.
Apart from the name of the contact, you can personalize your emails based on the demographics of your contacts. You can personalize emails based on where they live. Geographic-focused contact can be very valuable for businesses that have local stores or local events. You can send personalized emails to subscribers based on those locations only making them feel more special and welcome.
Similarly, you can personalize your emails based on their gender. Women expect to get offers and product updates consistent with their gender and the same goes for men.
Names and demographics are an example of basic personalization. If you want to step up your personalization game a little bit, you can do so by customizing the email copy for different contacts. How?
You can show different content to different people in one broadcast email by adding specific tags to the contacts. In this way, you can basically send different emails to different people through one broadcast email only.
Apart from content optimization, you can optimize images based on basic personalization data. One example of this can be showing a testimonial from a person your contact can most relate with.
You can personalize emails based on contact behavior and engagement with your brand. Has a contact attended a previous webinar? Maybe they have clicked a series of links around a specific topic? If they have, you can customize your emails by sending hyper-relevant content.
If you are an eCommerce store, you can send relevant emails based on customers’ interactions with your brand. You can track actions your contacts take on your website, apps and then send emails based on those actions.
Now that we have covered personalization for mass emails, are you ready to send your first email blast?
The first thing you need to send bulk emails is email marketing software.
When sending mass emails, you have two options. You can either send text-centric emails that look like you have sent them from your personal email to give your contacts that feeling of being close to you and you’re treating them like friends.
OR
You can create a beautiful HTML email that includes text, images, videos, call-to-action (CTA) buttons. With Mailmunch, you can do both. Let’s look at an example of an HTML email from Mailmunch.
The type of email you use depends on your bulk email goal. If you are doing a new product announcement, design an HTML email that puts the value of your new product in the front and center. If you decide to send the rich-text email then make sure your email copy is top-tier.
With Mailmunch, you get access to a collection of pre-made professionally designed email marketing templates that help you send bulk emails. There are ready-to-use templates for different industries for:
Browse the available templates and choose the one that fulfils your campaign objectives.
Now that you have selected an email template, its time to add all things relevant to your brand to it. You can customize using the drag and drop editor that lets you add images, videos, CTAs, products. It also lets you change font size, color, add headings, bullet points and much more.
Here is a preview of Mailmunch’s drag and drop builder.
With more than half of your audience opening emails on their mobile devices, its extremely important that you optimize your emails for different devices.
Preview your bulk emails on desktop and mobile to make sure it’s highly responsive and mistake-free. Email preview is effective to proofread your email content and make sure everything looks good.
You can also send a test email to yourself or your team to see how the email would look like in the inbox.
Now that you have built a beautiful email and it’s ready to go, the next step is to define your target audience. Depending on how you manage your email lists, you can filter contacts and send your bulk email campaign to a specific segment.
After selecting your target audience, you can either send your email right away or schedule it to be sent on a specific date and time.
Now that you have sent your bulk email, what’s left for you is to monitor your performance. Check your email marketing analytics to understand and learn from your performance and see what worked and what didn’t.
In the Mailmunch app, you can access an easy-to-understand and in-depth dashboard to learn about your email campaign’s performance.
The dashboard provides you with a report that includes:
When sending bulk emails, it’s important that your email lands in the inbox and doesn’t end up in the spam folder. How can you avoid that? Let’s have a look!
You shouldn’t buy email lists at any costs whatsoever. Always build your email lists organically so your spam rate is as minimum as possible.
Generate leads from your website or landing pages or social media. Have a look at some lead generation ideas to help you start building a larger organic email list.
Dont use capital letters in your email subject lines. If you think it’s effective in capturing the attention of your readers, you are wrong.
Sending all caps email subject lines triggers spam filters and prevents your emails from being delivered.
All bulk emails should include an unsubscribe link as it allows your subscribers to unsubscribe from emails rather than mark emails as spam. About 50% of people mark a brand email as spam because they can’t find a way to unsubscribe.
Email marketing continues to evolve and everyone wants to receive personalized communication. 50% of companies feel that personalization increases engagement, and you can incorporate that into your bulk emails too.
You should clean your email lists using the subscriber’s data at hand. Sort your first names, last names, company names, behavior patterns, etc. You can add tags in your email subject lines and within your emails, to talk directly to the recipient.
With all this information at hand, you can also make decisions on who to send all the emails to. For example, if you have a new product update or discount and you want to send an email to update your audience. Ideally you should clean your list and not send the email to subscribers who haven’t interacted with your emails in the last three to four months. This will eventually also improve your email deliverability and engagement rate.
Monitoring the performance of your bulk email campaigns is really important. It tells you what works, what doesn’t work, and what you can do to improve your future mass emails campaigns. Let’s have a look at some of the important email metrics to keep in mind.
Open rate is the percentage of recipients who open your email out of the total people who received the email. The open rate of your mass emails is a good comparative metric.
Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one of the links in your email. Clickthrough rate is a key indicator of the relevance of your message for the subscribers.
The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that do not get delivered. A bounce could be a hard or a soft bounce. Hard bounces are because of invalid, non-existent email addresses. A soft bounce is a temporary non-delivery of email because of a full inbox or a problem with the recipient's server.
Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of the total recipients who unsubscribe after receiving the email.
When bulk emailing is done right, it can increase your ROI significantly. You can use it to inform your audience about the upcoming product releases, seasonal sales, customers update, etc.
Sending personalized emails is a game-changer for both the business and the customers. To make that happen, you need to do two things:
Content marketer by day and book nerd by night, Momina works at Mailmunch as a Marketing Communications Specialist. Momina eats, sleeps, and breathes content marketing. Her expertise ranges from ideation to production to distribution of content, thanks to 4+ years of experience in the B2B content marketing sphere.
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M. Usama
April 19, 2024
M. Usama
April 19, 2024
M. Usama
April 18, 2024
