Mythbusting: Is Mass Email Marketing Really Over?

As an affirmed expert in email marketing, our founder Travis Ketchum gets heaps of different questions, but there is one about mass email marketing that comes up often — is mass email marketing really dead?

As they get conflicting information from different sources, some people seem to think that mass email marketing is a thing of the past. Guided by the immense experience that led to the creation of Campaign Refinery and the knowledge stemming from it, we firmly stand behind the claim that mass email marketing is very much alive. In fact, it’s the whole ballgame! 

But before making any claims, let’s go back to the basics and revisit the definition of mass email marketing. This will help us answer why mass email marketing got such a bad rep and shed some light on where the confusion comes from. 

What is mass email marketing and how do we define it

What it is: Mass email marketing is a promotional method where marketers create and distribute a single email to a large number of recipients, seeking to get as high open, click, and conversion rates as possible. Mass email is also known as bulk email, and mass email marketing as bulk email marketing. 

There are several names for this technique: mass emails, bulk emails, or email blasts (e-blasts). At Campaign Refinery, we call them — broadcasts! 

Contrary to the belief of some, mass email marketing is one of the best practices of email marketing, despite its limitations regarding personalization. Although tailored messages do have better open and click rates in principle, mass emails get quite a lot of traction if you distribute them to a healthy email list. 

What it is NOT: Mass email marketing is not the same as cold emailing. A common misbelief that cold emails equal mass emails is what caused confusion about the effectiveness of this popular practice. Although cold emails are something marketers advise against — for example, Campaign Refinery strictly forbids cold emailing — some senders still use mass email technique to reach out to customers and prospects this way. You should know that sending unsolicited emails to large audiences will give you a bad sender reputation, it can be the cause of many spam complaints, and it’s even illegal in some jurisdictions! 

However, sending mass emails to known, vetted audiences is a powerful digital marketing technique any business can apply. Think regular updates, offers, sales, and of course — the newsletter. 

Mass Email Marketing in Numbers

Everyone knows email marketing is a channel with one of the highest ROI, and we can tell you — this is not by chance. 

Did you know that there are about 4.15 billion email users in the world — almost twice as many as social media users numbering approximately 2.35 billion people. That’s almost twice the number of potential customers, the conversions, everything! 

Furthermore, over 30% of Americans don’t trust social media companies with their private data, so email is the more secure, logical solution for them. 

Solely looking at numbers, email is hard to compete with, and businesses who can utilize this channel should do so. You can start building an email list even if you have already established a presence elsewhere on social media, giving your product and services more exposure. 

Types of Mass Emails We Have Today

Over the past decade, mass email marketing has advanced from blunt email blasting to a more sophisticated promotional method. During the global pandemic, the whole world turned to the digital spheres, and the prevalence of email became apparent. 

Today, email is far from a simple message consisting of text and a few attachments. It’s possible to send responsive messages adapted for both desktop and mobile, to integrate with CSS and HTML and to add animations or interactive elements to them. The evolution of email clearly suggests that our notions about what email marketing is need to grow as well. 

There are several types of mass emails you can send, all familiar and frequently used. The burning question is whether to send a broadcast to your entire list, or to adjust it according to audience segments. Not every message can — or should — go to everyone, and that’s where personalization and segmentation come in, but some general-purpose announcements you can easily distribute to all subscribers at once. 

To diversify between mass emails, here are several examples:

• The Newsletter: Sharing the news from your company and the niche you’re in is the most common and the most widely known type of mass email. If a person opted-in to get your emails, they will want your newsletter, and you can freely send a single message to all. Remember to always add value to your messages and include meaningful CTAs. It’s good to know that the newsletter was the most common mass email marketing campaign sent in 2022. 
• Promotions: It’s perfectly alright to promote your product, sales and build awareness for your brand by sending mass promotional emails to large audiences. There is no need to pinpoint every contact’s preference in these messages, and you can comfortably share promos and campaigns that inform them about new or interesting products and services you offer. As long as they are voluntarily on your list, your contacts will not mind receiving promotional emails. 
• Offers and deals: Once you have an interested subscriber, it’s a good idea to entice them to convert. Campaigns that focus on acquisition drive your revenue, so inspiring people to purchase your products by offering them discounts and deals is a good idea. 
• Retention emails: Did you know that acquiring a new customer can cost 5-7 times more than keeping the existing one? That’s why it’s crucial to craft and send customer retention emails regularly. You can target a broad audience of existing buyers and send a bulk email with an offer once in a while to show appreciation and boost sales at the same time. 
• Events: If you’re planning a big event or your business is participating in one, sending a bulk email to your list is alright. If the event is happening in a specific location, use geotagging to segment your list, but if it’s online – it’s OK to send to all. Just remember to add the correct time and location. 

Mass Email Best Practices with Tips

Even though mass email marketing is alive and well, it doesn’t mean you can just blast your messages across the board and expect results. There are several best practices to follow, the biggest one being – personalization.  

Here’s why:

• Personalized emails get more clicks and conversions (by 14% and 10%, respectively),
• Personalized emails increase customer engagement,
• Emails with personalized elements get 6x transactions than those without.

How do I personalize bulk emails?

You can make your emails more personal by adding customer-related data to them, such as their name or their email address to the “To:” field, or even a relevant interest. First, you’ll need to collect information about them when they opt in and then create customer profiles for different email list segments. 

Luckily, this process is automated, and at Campaign Refinery we make it easy to collect all the necessary data about your customers and use dynamic fields to personalize your mass messages, so you can easily distribute them to large subscriber groups. 

Again, by segmenting your email list properly, you can get better results since you’ll be sending highly relevant and appealing content to your subscribers, such as recommendations or special personal offers. Branching mass email campaigns into different sales paths is also simple, by adding different automated triggers and creating post-purchase sequences. 

Remember, in mass email campaigns, even a little personalization goes a long way. 

Dynamic fields or dynamic tags are a feature in email services that allows customers to create placeholders to personalize messages. Dynamic fields come in the form of merge variables and you can use them to add subscribers name or other data to the message. 

How do I create a mass email for marketing?

Let your creativity kick in! You’re standing in front of an opportunity to engage your audience and get them to trust you and convert. Think about the nature of your email and adapt the content to it, it should be clear which path to take then. 

There are several points you should pay attention to:

• Subject line: Make sure your subject line is catchy and on point — this is the first line to grab attention. 
• Focus: You should focus on delivering a single message only. Not the time to disperse into talking about your company and sending overwhelming content. Stick to the point you’re trying to make. 
• Wording: Steer clear of spammy words such as “free”, “hot”, “you won’t believe,” and similar. This can get you in trouble. 
• Preview text: Add a preview of the email text to show the recipient what the email is about and make sure they want to click on it. Using Campaign Refinery, you can craft a preview text different from the email body and sneak a CTA in there!
• CTA: Make sure your CTA is clear and visible. Mass emails should contain one powerful call-to-action, as you’re sticking to the point. 
• Brand: Always stay on brand — your language, visuals, colors should reflect your brand, as you’ll build more awareness and loyalty this way. 

Whether it’s a newsletter, an event invitation or a product update, you can create mass emails any way you want, as long as you follow the base rules and send them to a verified list. 

Campaign Refinery Broadcasts – Highlights in Mass Email Strategy

Our customers know our UI and can confirm that sending mass emails has never been easier! 

For this particular type of campaign, we have an option called “broadcasts”. 

Broadcasts are one-off emails you send to large audiences promoting your business, and you can create them by using our simple editor or by using the custom HTML option to implement the design made in any of the popular 3rd party email editors. That’s it! 

After that, your broadcast’s success is the result of your effort and our superpowered mechanisms. And you can track it with our detailed analytics tool. 

Is it safe to send 1500+ emails at once?

Well, yes and no. 🙂

If you have a huge list and want to send more than 1500 emails in a course of a day, you can do that, but not manually. Many email clients have sending limitations: for example, Gmail will let you send 500 emails per day or one email to 500 addresses. So, manual sending is pretty much disabled. 

However, there’s a solution for this, and it’s called – email service providers!  (Yes, we are one of those.) Email service providers, or ESPs as you’ll find people refer to them around the internet, can help you send large volumes of emails, amounting to millions of messages every month. 

Campaign Refinery, for example, focuses on helping large senders improve their deliverability and open rates. This means that we work to help businesses that send thousands of emails daily and have their messages reach the primary inboxes of their subscribers. 

Not to brag, but we’re really good at this. With our powerful tools and more options to stimulate engagement, we know that if you keep your list clean and follow the rules you can see your deliverability improve by 30% — especially when sending mass emails!

So, to summarize the question: sending over 1500 emails per day is safe with the right ESP. 

Check out Campaign Refinery. 

What to Look for in a Bulk Email Service Provider

There are many ESPs on the market, and finding the right one is extremely important. Whether you’re a big sender or not, you should look into a provider that offers high deliverability, which is the prerequisite for a favorable email marketing outcome. Starting from there, you should look into what type of customers they serve, what kind of tools and options they offer, and if there are any success stories. 

Learn to recognize valuable bulk email tools:

• General tools: look at what is included in the price package,
• UI: it should be clean and easy to navigate,
• Automation options: ideally, there should be custom automation options. Campaign Refinery has a custom automation rule builder included in its lowest price package!
• Template library: templates can save you a lot of time, especially when you launch multiple campaigns.
• Comprehensive analytics: email is a numbers game, so it’s crucial to get all the numbers you need to make educated tweaks to future emails.
• Support: if you opt for a trial, test how dedicated and responsive the support is. For example, as Campaign Refinery you get a dedicated success manager when you purchase the Enterprise Plan. 

Additionally, Campaign Refinery provides unique features:

• Built-in email list hygiene tool to keep your email list crisp n’ clean,
• Message gamification option to launch your engagement rate to outer space,
• Evergreen flash sales feature to enable you to sell anything, 
• Mandatory domain authentication to make sure you’re on the way to success, 
• Credit system to incentivize you to be a smart sender. 

Learn more about our features, plans and pricing.

Let’s Bust This Myth for Good: Does bulk email marketing work?

You betcha! But only if done well!

This means that if you continue the old practice of sending out email blasts to poorly maintained email lists, including old lists (we don’t even want to mention purchased lists!), without proper personalization, filled with spammy subjects and aggressive content – no, your mass email marketing efforts will not work. 

But this is not the end! If you send poorly crafted emails to your subscribers, lukewarm messages to your dormant contacts or vague CTAs to anyone – you should also not expect results. 

Finally, if you choose to send bulk emails for the wrong campaigns, the action will fail. 

So, to make bulk email marketing work, you will need to:

1. Make sure your email list is valid and clean,
2. Figure out which campaign type you want to send,
3. Stick to the single email – single message strategy, 
4. Keep the look and feel of your brand, 
5. And most importantly – select the right email service provider for your business. 

Mass Email with Campaign Refinery

By this point, it’s clear we believe businesses should definitely use mass email marketing techniques to get more leads and conversions, especially if you’re a big sender. It all boils down to sender reputation and the power of ESP tools. That’s why our team of experts dedicated years to creating the most brilliant email marketing tools that get the best results.

Some of our clients’ open rates have increased by 2, 3, or even 6 times since signing up with us, while their sender reputations are the best they’ve ever seen.

To get there, it took time and effort. 

Are you ready to make things work for your business too?

Why not learn how to jumpstart your email marketing by yourself?

Here’s the deal: we will give you a gift, a document that reveals the secrets behind industry-leading deliverability, all of which you can implement yourself! The document in question is “The Inbox Formula,” a comprehensive guide about email setup, email list maintenance, bulletproof email practices, and industry insights to help you design your best email marketing strategy. 

Our founder and email expert, Travis Ketchum, wrote these guidelines after decades of testing and trying different strategies and techniques, and we use them to this day! 

And you can have them now – free of charge!

Interested?

Download the “Inbox Formula” here: click to download.

If you like it, drop us a line – our inbox is open!

Until then – happy emailing!