There I was on LinkedIn looking at a digital marketing company’s page that said it offers “email blasts.”
Ugh.
No thank you.
A blast is when you’re napping on a Sunday afternoon and your neighbor decides to shoot off fireworks because he has a touch of pyromania.
A blast is when you’re at a red light and the car next to you has its stereo at max volume, with subwoofers taking up the whole back seat.
A blast is when you’re trying to enjoy a peaceful meal at a restaurant, but another diner is yelling at the server because it’s the WORST SERVICE EVER and she is going to tell all her friends not to eat there.
A blast is when a volcano erupts, a coach gets angry at the ref, a building is demolished.
Is that really how you want to treat your customers?
Why email blasts are bad
Look, I get it. People have been calling the act of sending a message to a large group of people an “email blast” for a while. Blast is a fun word. It’s short. It gets the job done. But it’s not the right mindset for communicating with your customers. I mean, do you want to be blasted at when you open your email? I don’t.
Treating your email as a blast can lead to talking at your recipients. It turns your email into a flyer. A notification. It’s a rubber stamp instead of a hand-written signature. Your email subscribers will think of it as such.
What to do instead of an email blast
The name of the game in marketing these days is personalization. Your clients and prospects want to know you’re thinking about them on a personal level. Everyone’s a unique individual, after all.
Many businesses send out emails with the subject line and/or email opening using the |first name| field from their email database and call it done. There! They’ve personalized the email, right? After all, marketing research shows if you use someone’s name in an email, they’re more responsive to it.
There’s more to it than that. If you really want to send an effective email to your customers, the key is to be authentic. It’s to craft a message that sounds like you’re talking to someone one on one. Marketing guru Neil Patel implores businesses to “treat customers like the humans they are…. [write] email copy like an actual human being instead of a business.”
Need help with email copy?
Use your email list to start a conversation with your subscribers. Give them a valuable takeaway. Make it worth their while to stay subscribed to your list.
I write email copy for small businesses and offer email marketing consultation. Just send me a message and let me know who your audience is and what you’re trying to accomplish. I promise not to blast you.