Stop Blasting Your Email
Once upon a time, email marketing was all about blasts. You’d set up a single message to broadcast to the masses. Rinse and repeat.
Now, this “batch-and-blast” method of bulk-sending promotions willy-nilly to everyone is obsolete. More than ever, people don’t want to deal with irrelevant messages, and it’s become a lot easier segment and target what we have to say.
Despite this, the lingo and attitudes of batch-and-blast haunt the way folks still talk about and work with email today. Think about it: “blasting” people with email or employing the ol’ “spray and pray” approach uses the language of violence and recklessness. Marketing isn’t a war but a process of persuasion, getting people on your side, conversion rather than assault.
The indiscriminate nature of batch-and-blast harms your email marketing effectiveness. It subtracts rather than builds goodwill, it’s counterproductive to your deliverability, and it’s just not a smart way to work.
So what’s the modern, more peaceful, model for email marketing?
Go Beyond Batch-and-Blast to Message/Market Fit
Batch-and-blast’s focus on the outward action of broadcasting skews your goals to aim for quantity instead of quality. As email marketer Kristin Bond puts it, simply using the term “blast” signals a lack of understanding of email marketing:
To me, when someone refers to an email as a blast, what they’re really saying is, “Email marketing is easy, and any idiot with a Constant Contact account can do it. It requires no skills at all, and isn’t a field that people spend years learning and specializing in.”
The batch-and-blast mindset disregards the art and science of relevance. Whether it’s egocentrism or naiveté, the batch-and-blaster’s approach is one of one-sided assumption. “Because it’s my message, of course it’s relevant. Take it or leave it,” goes the thinking. Yet that’s the equivalent of building a product that nobody wants.
In fact, let’s apply the concept of product/market fit to email marketing. According to Marc Andreessen’s definition, product/market fit is being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. That market is made up of actual people — and when you’ve made something that those actual people want, that’s what gives you the footing to scale.
Think about your messages as your product. Fit is another way to think about relevance that reminds you that the mere existence of a message isn’t enough. You have to think about who’s on the other end of the line. How much have you found out about your audience’s needs and goals in relation to your business? What are you doing to achieve message/market fit?
The power of email is that it can feel like such a personal channel — and still scale. And moving beyond the batch-and-blast approach means thinking much harder about people’s experiences instead of assuming that one-size-fits-all.
What That Means for Your Email Marketing Strategy
When your lodestar is message/market fit, or relevance, some traditional FAQs on email marketing become less significant:
- There is no overarching best time to send an email. In other words, the best time to send an email depends on the type of email, individual context, and at a group level, on your audience.
- Growing your subscribers or new user accounts has to be based around real engagement and permission. Forget about purchased, rented, and third party lists just to have a bigger list.
- Even thinking about lists as static categories for email addresses is on its way out. Segmentation isn’t something that just happens once. Relevance is much more fluid.
There’s no trick or hack to relevance. You have to focus on content and context, connecting your business goal more closely with human beings in real life. Talk to and write for real people: your tribe, audience, users, customers — and the right segments for your message fit. Heed the wisdom of customer service and email expert, Diana Potter to “Make emails, not war. Stop blasting your email. Send them. Gently, with great care, and thought.”
There are already so many negative feelings of anxiety, nerves, and annoyance swirling around our voluminous inboxes and impersonal marketing approaches. It’s no wonder that the general populace recoils when they think about their email. A bit of care and consideration goes a long way.
What’s one of your pet peeves about email marketing?
Adapted from a post originally published on the Customer.io blog.
