What are Bulk Sends?

Bulk Sends are emails that you design and send to all or a large number of subscribers.

The time when Email Marketing meant pushing Bulk sends 2-3 times per week in order to generate sales is DONE. You need to stop doing that right away because you are headed into Email Marketing Bankruptcy.

 

OK, so what should I do?

Great question – even better attitude :).

You need to speak to everyone on your list, not just the 1% that will convert.

Googling “How to send better newsletters” will give you advice on design most of the time – which is OK – but it’s 100%, not the most important part. Many times, I have seen that a simpler, text-heavy design, gets more sales than a more complex, banner-heavy template.

What is important is for you to understand is that the email needs to be relevant for everyone who will open it.

 

Think about it!

You send an email to 100K subscribers / 20% Open Rate, 5% Click-Through Rate.

This means that 15.000 people opened your email and were not interested in it. They associate that email with you wasting their time, they associate your brand with irrelevancy.

You do not want that but marketers seem to be OK with it because everyone’s doing it.

You want to make sure your bulk send is relevant not only to people that will click (go for the promo, rsvp to the event, read the article, etc), you want to make sure your email is relevant to people that won’t interact with the email.

 

What is relevant for all email openers?

That is up to you to decide based on your business but here are a few examples of blocks of content you could use:

  • highlight “good customer feedback” so the non-buyers think “hey, these guys are doing a good job”
  • show your latest blog post or guide or youtube video
  • talk about upcoming events
  • exciting news from your vertical and/or about your community

 

How to do this efficiently?

Go to Google Sheets and import a calendar template. Grab your team and make notes of all the year’s relevant events, and or holidays, write down MAP breaks from brands, season start, and end dates, warehouse clearance dates, blog/social posts, anything relevant for your business and community, etc. Once this is done, you already have a good base for your Email Marketing Calendar. Next time you need to send out an email, look for the closest 2 events from your calendar and use them. 

If you don’t have any relevant events (get some, get involved!) you can always turn to customer-submitted data. Highlighting product reviews, store reviews will help.