Email burst dos and don’ts
Email Bursts are easier said than done for lots of senders because there is a lot of misunderstanding in what is best for your sending. Read more...
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Email burst sending is something that more and more people are asking about as their email lists grow. It beats sending multiple emails, rewriting or copying the subject line of the email, the email body, and email attachments for numerous iterations of the same email are annoying and time-consuming.
Thankfully, email has come a long way to provide a variety of email burst options to senders of every size. Regardless of which bursting option you choose, you still need to follow email sending best practices in order to ensure better email deliverability. Otherwise, your reputations can take a hit, and you won’t land in the email inbox at all.
Table of contents
DON’T send to purchased lists – DO send to segmented, opted-in lists
Take a look at your list, how did you generate this recipient list? If your answer is “I didn’t.” or “Well, we’ve had it for a long time…” don’t start sending! Bought email lists are a one-way ticket to a bad sender reputation and the spam folder. If you’re dealing with an older list, consider running it through an email validations service to clean out old inboxes and other high-risk addresses.
If you’ve obtained those addresses through a sign-up with an opt-in policy and cleaned them up, send away!
DON’T send to everyone all at one time – DO send burst emails at various intervals
Nobody likes getting the same message at the same time, regardless of whether it’s a text message via a burst SMS text or an email. Stagger your sending by at least 30 minutes and depending on the size, either split your list in half or into fourths. That way, you won’t see any delay in your sending, and ISPs won’t flag you for spam-like behavior.
Sending in intervals also allows you to play around with your segmentation. Look at different data sets concerning your recipients and see how you could segment for better messaging based on time zones and other factors.
DON’T send unoriginal content – DO personalize your email bursts
If you are going to send to thousands of people, don’t just send the same bland email to each recipient. Emails that aren’t personalized and have dull, uninspired subject lines sent to recipients tend to perform worse than those that get creative. Fewer engagements can lead to a lower reputation, and that leads to the spam folder and poor email delivery.
How can you personalize your emails? Consider adding different variables to do some of the heavy lifting for you. For example, you can add a variable to use the recipient’s first name to add a nice personal touch or add data items in the body of the email that the recipient might find interesting based on factors like geographic location, age, industry, etc. Don’t be afraid to get creative here; just be sure that your variables are working correctly before you send.
Overall: follow best practices
While the rules vary depending on your sending (transactional, marketing, etc.), sending best practices will always dictate how you should send email. If you aren’t following send best practices, then you can expect any email you send, burst or not, to land in the spam folder.
