How To Optimize Mass Email Marketing For Better Conversion

You might think that new and modern marketing channels such as social media or videos are the kings nowadays. Yet, email marketing slays with an ROI of 44$ for every 1$ a company spends. On the race track, all other opponents are left behind a long mile compared to email marketing.

While getting the entire email marketing strategy right - from selecting the right email service provider to choosing the tactic to use, it all may seem a little complicated. But, as a huge asset of building relationships with customers, mass email marketing is among the primary email marketing activities for businesses that you should understand.

Therefore, creating valuable mass email campaigns is not something to take lightly. You will need to understand how to engage with subscribers on your list and learn how you can send effective email campaigns.

In this article, I will help you:

• Understand mass email marketing

• Send personalized mass campaigns

• Create a mass email campaign

• Learn to send mass campaigns effectively

If the above reasons are why you land on this guide about mass email marketing, then welcome, and let’s get started!

What is mass email marketing?

Mass email marketing (or bulk email marketing) is a practice of email marketing that implies sending a mass email to a large group of subscribers.

Mass email marketing can be used for:

• Information to customers

• Special promotional

• New products release

• Promote upcoming webinars, etc.

Businesses can send mass emails every day. When an online flower delivery shop, from which you bought flowers for your girlfriend in the past, sends you a reminder email for Valentine’s day, that is their mass email marketing campaign for the lovers’ special day.

Nowadays, most marketers prefer to use more personalized emails that can cater to different segments and interests within their subscriber list as tailored messages to individuals are proven to be more effective than a mass email. Marketers are accomplishing personalization at a larger scale by using email marketing automation’s scalability and simplicity.

Let’s look at examples of old-style mass email marketing and new-style mass email campaigns to give you a better picture.

Mass email marketing - old style vs. new style

Mass email marketing, as suggested, is when you send the same email to a large subscriber list. It’s not much used as a marketing strategy nowadays since it often yields a very low conversion rate.

Mass email is usually not customized, does not contain personalized offers, and is delivered to an unfiltered audience that may likely be not interested in what your company has to say.

The old style of mass email marketing

Marketers used to mass email their leads three times a week or even more, hoping that they could generate enough new customers to fill the top of the pipeline consistently.

The old style of mass email campaigns looks something like this:

*“Hi there, *

Don’t miss out on our 20% OFF this month, from July 20th to July 31st. Only the earliest buyers can earn the discount, so hurry your feet to MyStore!”

As you can see, this type of email could work but with a very slim chance of getting to actual consumers that are interested in your products. The reasons for an old style of a mass email campaign to work may be:

• Valuable offer: The 20% OFF would grab many people’s attention. While the email isn’t personalized, the prospects on a company’s list would often be interested in a discount.

• The call to action: Back in the old days, online coupons weren’t really popular, so with the email telling consumers to go to MyStore directly for the discount, buyers know exactly what they need to do. However, it would be hard for the company to track if the ones who showed up are the result of the mass email campaign or not.

• Or maybe the generic opening: With the “hi there”, recipients may be curious enough to click in and find out what the email is actually about.

The point is that you have no clear way to know why a mass email campaign worked and even more clueless when it didn’t. Whatever the cause is, when prospects stop opening your mass emails, you know you have a problem, and the solution is even harder to find.

The new style of mass email marketing

So, income personalization to keep the mass emails more relevant. Just the same email above could be way different if you opened by greeting each recipient by his/her name.

Next, you can try customizing the sending time of your mass email campaigns. Using bulk email marketing services, you can test to see which time your subscribers often open your emails to send a mass campaign. However, these are just copied and paste templates; if you want to go deeper into email marketing personalization, read our best email personalization tips.

After a few decades of receiving so many mass emails that now are even considered spamming, adding a name or a company name may not be enough to turn your mass emails into magical new campaigns. Prospects don’t just want personalization; they also wish tailored, focused emails and bring real value.

You can do this by letting your emails provide what your recipients want; here is an example for the new style of mass email marketing:

“Hello [First name],

The summer is here, and you must have been exhausted with all the heat in [city location]? Head quickly to MyStore to shop the newest swimming gear and outfits for your next getaway. If you are lucky, you may even win a ticket to Paradise Island!

Here is a 10% OFF code to help you shop right away on our online store: SUMMERTIME

See you on the next trip!”

You can send this email with a few more reminder emails, creating an email workflow that sends mass campaigns but has customized responses based on the recipient’s interaction. To break down why the new style of mass email marketing works better, here are the reasons:

• You open with a custom event that prospects can feel relevant

• You connect their desire with your store’s products

• You provide a specific solution for their problems

Now you don’t have to robotically send mass campaigns. And you’re not just filling the top of your pipelines. You’re moving people through your pipeline.

How to send better mass email marketing?

In this section, let’s see how you can create a tailored and personalized mass email campaign that would undoubtedly yield a better conversion rate.

#1. Collect subscribers’ data

Data is the fuel for any email campaign’s personalization. The more information you are able to collect about your contacts, the more possibilities you have to personalize your emails. See how in the email above, I included not only the subscriber’s name but also the city location where they lived in?

You can collect information about your audience through an opt-in form on your website, where they fill in to join your email list. AVADA Email Marketing can help you set up this form in a breeze with many styles as well, such as newsletter, coupon pop-ups, or fortune wheels.

Forms are only one way to collect information about your subscribers, so you can use them later to personalize your emails. You can also have more data about your contacts based on their behavior information.

Behavior-based information is the data you gain from documenting your subscribers’ reactions, such as:

• Downloading a specific ebook

• Getting educational emails from your company

• Becoming a lead

• Becoming a paying customer

You can add meta descriptions to your subscribers’ behaviors inside the AVADA Email Marketing app. Yes, you can tag meta information to your list’s subscribers based on their behaviors. Sounds cool, isn’t it?

This act of tagging helps you:

• Know what type of content your audience is interested in

• Avoid spamming your subscribers

• Identify their life-cycle stage

• Segment them according to the behavior

With the app, you won’t need to add tags to your subscribers manually; you can set it as an automated process to save your time and conveniently collect data. Of course, you can also add your customized tags alongside the tags that AVADA provided.

This way, you can personalize your mass email campaigns with the data provided by subscribers and also data based on the behaviors.

#2. Personalize the mass email

It’s impossible to talk about mass email marketing without mentioning personalization, especially with the subject lines. Just with a bit of tweaking, you can have personalized email subject lines that can increase the open rates.

You can also add personalized variables into your email’s content, as the image above from the AVADA app suggests. You can add your contact’s first and last name, email address, cart item, order total, recover cart link, and more. The email in the picture above is a reminder email that can follow up with your mass email for promotion, as an example.

Even though you are sending one email design to an extensive list of subscribers, you can still use the app to make each email different and personalized for each contact by using personalized variables. Just click on the “Variable” icon in your editor box, and you can select the custom fields to add to your email content.

This is a powerful tool to use for your mass email marketing campaigns since personalized emails can have a 29 percent higher open rate and a 41 percent higher unique click rate than not personalized emails.

#3. Apply filters to set up your targets

Filtering is an original feature inside the AVADA Email Marketing app. It allows you to find and create a set of subscribers that have some attributes in common ( such as downloaded an ebook, subscribers over a specific age, subscribed in a specific period, bought some products, etc.).

You can easily identify groups of people in your database and save them with a memorable name to later reuse the same search criteria.

Your email campaigns will then select recipients using these saved filters. So you can send mass email campaigns to your whole list but have relevant offers based on interest, life-cycle stage, geo-location, and more.

How to send mass email campaigns without spamming?

As mentioned above, mass email campaigns can be considered spamming by some email service providers, or your users find them irrelevant and mark your emails as spam. The last thing you want is for your hard-worked emails to end up in the spam folder, not being able to show what your company can provide.

Keep your list organic

Don’t buy a sketchy email list from some shady sources online. That’s what spammers do, and you may very well be banned from sending emails if you do so. If you want to keep spammers away from your contact form, try including a Captcha.

The best approach is to have an organic email list and generate leads directly from your website. Read this to learn how to create a winning lead generation system for your company.

Include an unsubscribe link

All mass email campaigns must include an unsubscribe button as it allows your contacts to unsubscribe rather than having to mark your emails as spam. According to a study, 50% of recipients mark an email as spam because they can’t find a place to unsubscribe.

If you want to keep all the most authentic contacts as your email subscribers, you can use a double opt-in to prevent the irrelevant people or “bad users” from joining your email list.

If you don’t know, double opt-in is an email that triggers when someone subscribes to your email list, including a link to confirm a subscription. It is just one step more, but you can be sure that only the truly interested people in your emails get into the list.

Avoid writing subject lines with all caps

If you think using capital letters for the email subject line will be effective in capturing the recipient’s attention, you are wrong. Writing email subject lines in all caps can trigger spam filters and send your emails straight to the spam box.

You may have a great email to send with full value and relevance to the recipients. But if your subject line can’t entice readers, there’s a very high chance your email will get deleted without even being opened.

So here are a few examples of solid subject lines for your mass emails:

• Ask a question: “Is your online store being found by Google searchers?”

• State upfront the value you can give them: “$20 off your next order”

• Create intrigue: “This is the best thing you can do to improve your summer clothes”

Simplicity rules

You know the word KISS, right? (Keep it simple, stupid). Don’t try to accomplish too much with one mass email campaign that you send. Instead, let your mass email have a single purpose and send it out. If your attempt is to show 7 different points in your email, you probably will end up getting 0 points across.

Nobody has time to read an email that is not personalized, not to mention unfocused. If recipients find out that you are wasting their time, they probably would just mark your emails as spam or unsubscribe to never hear from you again.

Keep it short

Same for email content, let’s make a general rule to keep your mass email short. Even if your email content is genuinely awesome, there’s a good chance that the reader is already occupied with other things in their lives. They might be genuinely interested in what your mass email has to offer, but if they don’t have to read it, they will leave it away for reading later. Eventually, they just never get to read it fully.

So whatever your mass email campaign has to say, keep it as short as possible. There are few people who are interested enough to open your email, see paragraphs after paragraphs and still commit to reading it all the way right then. Be respectful of your readers’ time, keep your mass email’s message brief and to the point, and you can stay out of the spam folder.

What is the best time to send mass email marketing?

Sending your mass email campaign at the right time can certainly increase your email open rates. There are some general tips on when to send a mass email campaign, which are:

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are favorite days for marketers to send mass email campaigns.

For the time, here are what my research found out:

• 6 AM: 50% of recipients begin their day with reading emails first thing in the morning, so why not?

• 10 AM: This is perfect for office time since workers are well settled and may check their emails.

• 12 PM: When people are out of work mode and look for distractions during break or lunch.

• 8 PM: This is suitable for people who check emails at the end of the workday or before going to bed.

No one checks emails while sleeping so you should always send emails during the daytime (according to your list’s contact time zones) when people are awake and ready to open some emails.

Avoid sending mass email campaigns on Mondays. This is when many feel the Monday mood and just want to delete useless emails so their inboxes are ready for the week.

Weekend mass emails tend to have a lower open rate since people are on adventures, travel, date, etc. This is pretty self-explanatory.

Conclusion

The year is 2021, and you can’t simply get the right ROI from email marketing by sending the same message to your whole list anymore. Your mass email marketing strategy now needs to have the following winning features:

• Personalization: This means you need to collect data on customers, create customer profiles, and then segment the list to send more relevant messages to different groups of subscribers.

• Dynamic content: This is where you change a specific part of the email content to appeal to different profiles of customers or subscriber groups. Segmentation and dynamic content are how you use data to create hyper-relevant messages for your list subscribers.

• Automation: Mass emails now should serve as a tool for customers as well, as you can have automated triggers for emails like post-purchase, upsell, cross-sell, abandoned cart, and more.

It is also important to create tracking links and see the analytics of your mass email campaigns. Not to brag, but our app AVADA Email Marketing has all of the features above inside the dashboard, even for the free plan. So try our app today for the best conversion result of your mass email marketing campaign!