Staying on top of the audience’s mind and reaching maximum subscribers in the minimum time- these are two objectives that top the priority list of every email marketer out there, irrespective of the size of their business and the duration for which they have been plying their trade. Now, email is a nifty channel, no doubt, but to make the most of it, you need to know which of its buttons you need to press for a given set of circumstances. For instance, to achieve the two specific objectives mentioned above, your weapon of choice needs to be broadcast emails.
Broadcast emails refer to campaigns that are delivered to large email lists at a fixed time. They prove to be extremely effective when you have to spread the word of an upcoming product, service, or event or to just keep your audience in the know with respect to momentous organizational updates. These emails can either be sent to all the email addresses in your list or to a select few segments as well.
While broadcast emails are arguably the most traditional form of email marketing, you might face difficulties implementing them soundly if you are new to them. But all those uncertainties and bottlenecks will be laid to rest today. In this blog, we talk comprehensively about the techniques you must adopt while delivering broadcast emails, highlighting sufficient examples, too, that epitomize our arguments. Excited to master the craft of email broadcasting? Dive in, then!
What are the Different Types of Broadcast Emails?
Before we delve deeper into the many nuances of broadcast emails, it is important to first wrap our heads around the various identities it can take. Broadly, broadcast emails can be classified into 4 types.
- Newsletters: The crux of every business’ communication strategy, email newsletters enable brands to foster a dialogue around diverse topics with their subscribers, including company culture, forthcoming events, chatter around best-selling offerings, industry updates, and even curated content pertaining to their operational domain.
- Email digests: Email digests can be regarded as close cousins of newsletters, differing only with respect to content organization from them. While newsletters usually possess an eclectic spread (as we just talked about), digests have a more pointed direction and generally offer a horde of informational material centered around a specific topic. Said material could take the shape of blogs, videos, whitepapers, infographics, podcasts, and ebooks.
- Essential updates: This category of broadcast emails covers significant developments such as modifications in your privacy policy, amendments to your terms of service, the replenishment of a much sought-after product, or the arrival of a new release, all of which need to be communicated duly and swiftly to your subscriber base.
- Promotions: Promotional broadcast emails make your audience wise of the various sales, special discounts, and exclusive offers that your business organizes from time to time. The key to driving the maximum results with these emails is moderation- don’t spam your subscribers. Email fatigue is bad as it is; you don’t want to be contributing to it at any cost.
Broadcast Email Best Practices You Ought to Take Note of
Now that we understand the significance and various brackets of broadcast emails, let us take a look at a few tips and tricks that will help you take your broadcast email marketing game to the next level.
Add a Personal Touch
The practice of broadcasting involves sending out emails in bulk, of course, but that’s no reason to strip them of personalization. Over the last decade or so, business-customer relationships have become extremely sophisticated and evolved, thanks in large part to the large reserves of data marketers have at their disposal at present. In this scenario, if you continue to stay loyal to the batch and blast approach, your customers are bound to grow weary of you.
Therefore, even when you are sending out broadcast emails, it is vital to infuse a personal touch into them. It can be something as basic as addressing the customers by their first name, but do it nevertheless. One thing that can help you get personalization right is email list segmentation- divide your contacts into various groups on the basis of different parameters such as age, gender, location, past purchases, browsing history, position in the sales funnel, and the like. As we mentioned earlier, broadcasting doesn’t always entail sending the same message to all your contacts; sometimes, the information you want to share would only be relevant to a few sections. This is why segmentation is so important. It holds the key to improved personalization, thereby ushering in increased interaction and engagement.
Another thing you need to pay attention to is the phrasing of your broadcast emails. Because they address broad topics, most businesses tend to write their broadcast emails in an insipid and lackluster manner; this is something you should definitely look to steer clear of. Agreed that with broadcast emails, the focus is more on function than form, but crafting them with some personality isn’t going to hurt anyone, right? Make them conversational (while being formal or informal, as per your brand image), all while preserving the clinical elegance that these emails demand.
Keep the Content Sharp and Concise
Remember, the primary objective of a broadcast email is to disseminate information, meaning clarity must be its hallmark. And in order to realize clarity, the content of your broadcast emails must embody brevity. Crisp, concise, and to the point- if your content ticks all three of these boxes, you are gold. Your responsive email templates will thank you for doing so.
Lengthy emails are frowned upon as it is. When it comes to broadcast emails, however, they are downright unpardonable. You see, these emails, to begin with, function as PSAs, so the content understandably doesn’t have any riveting “stop press” nuggets in it. So, on top of that, if they happen to be long and winding, the readers can’t be faulted for maintaining a distance.
Organize the content to the best of your ability- use headings and subheadings, cut down clunky paragraphs into segments of 2-3 lines each, employ bullet points wherever necessary, and shear filler words and phrases. The more concerted your efforts are toward amplifying the readability of your broadcast emails, the more your subscribers will thank you for it. This, in turn, will skyrocket your returns (besides fetching you a ridiculous amount of brownie points).
Stay on Top of Timing
No matter how experienced an email marketer you are, if there’s one department that can test your wits every now and then, it is email timing. While you are, of course, encouraged to benefit yourself from the vast literature that exists on the topic, know that you don’t have the luxury of treating any of that as a hard and fast standard. At the end of the day, you will need to embrace Messr’s trial and error to figure out what works best for your target audience. Along with that, you can consider taking stock of these pointers too.
- Know your audience demographic like the back of your hand. This will help you glean relevant insights regarding their behavior and optimize your send timing accordingly.
- Play as per your industry’s rule book. When it comes to email timing, different industries have different trends. Hence, closely analyze your competitors to understand what customers in your domain mostly prefer.
- Get your email frequency right. Too many is as perilous as too few. Don’t rest till you find that sweet in-between.
- Account for seasonal changes. Track all the factors, physical or otherwise, that might have a bearing on your audience’s inbox browsing behavior before determining your email timing.
Write Knock-out CTAs
Immaterial of the type of email you are writing, the importance of the CTA continues to be paramount. After you have successfully conveyed the information you wished to, you also want your readers to act upon it, right? This is precisely where the CTA comes into the picture. Should your CTA be compelling and persuasive, it can successfully spur your users into action. Here are a few things you might want to keep in mind while composing your CTAs.
- Don’t compromise clarity in the quest of sounding witty and quirky.
- Use action words. That will help you establish a personal connect with the reader.
- Your CTA should inform the subscriber exactly where they’ll be led upon interacting with it.
Broadcast Email Examples You Can Pick a Few Tricks From
There’s no better way to understand the insights we’ve discussed so far than to see them all in action, don’t you agree? Below are a few examples that will help further ossify your understanding of broadcast emails.
Really Good Emails
Really Good Emails’ newsletter is easily one of the finest you’ll see out there. Mention the brand’s offering, curated content for the reader, and a lovely visual element- what’s not there to love about it!
Scratch
This email from Scratch is a fine example of how you can work personalization into your broadcast emails. When you sign up for Scratch’s newsletter, one of the few details they ask of you is your pet’s name. Here, they have wonderfully leveraged that information. Although the email contains information that applies to all dog parents, the gesture of addressing the pet by name (Delilah, in this instance) stands out.
Drunk Elephant
With crisp copy, an unparalleled visual flair, and impactful communication of the products’ USPs, this promotional broadcast email from Drunk Elephant hits all the right notes and then some more.
Food52
Whether you are a frozen pasta connoisseur, looking for a dessert recipe to surprise your Mom on Mother’s Day, or looking to indulge your grilling acumen further, this weekend email digest from Food52 has it all.
Wrapping It Up
Broadcast emails can be a handful at the outset, but as you start getting the lay of the land, you will always be left amazed by the results they will fetch you. We hope the best practices and examples shared will help you leverage the tremendous potential of broadcast emails to the fullest in the times to come!