Why we love eBlasts

At Farms.com we love email blasts. At least we do when they are done properly. If they have a “call to action” they can be incredibly effective. We believe they have three main benefits:

• Eblasts can build brand awareness & loyalty
• Drive traffic to your website
• Raise awarenss (as well as generate leads or sales) for specific products or services

One of the main reasons we love eblasts, is that when it comes to the last two benefits, website traffic and raising awareness, it is quite easy to see the metrics on your return on investment.

At Farms.com we use a third-party software. By using such a platform we are ensuring speed of deliverability, ensuring spam management is well under control, and it’s easy to use and efficient.

Ours is a list-based system, which means that we can easily manage our lists, and send messages according to the lists. It allows us to perform data imports which will add users to receive outbound communications as well as provide a cleansing report as to which users could not be imported as well as which users were considered duplicates.

After a message is sent it lets us know if any emails bounced, and whether they were hard (email address no longer valid) or soft bounces (email address box could be temporarily full).

Immediate Feedback
But here is the part we LOVE about eblasts. Feedback is immediate. We can review detailed tracking of user activity related to the eMail communication. We can actually get a list of those clients who opened the eblast and those that clicked on a link. The Activity report displays the percentages of the people who were sent the campaign who: Opened Only, Opened and Clicked, Unsubscribed, and Bounced.

Like the TV police Show “The First 48” we know how important the first 489 hours are after an eblast is sent. The Opens Histogram displays the number of emails opened in the first 48 hours after the message is delivered.

This tool is great, depending on the message, it can help you time your newsletter. Maybe Thursday afternoon distribution is more effective than Tuesday morning, for example.

If we have sent a number of messages to the same email list we can also track our message effectiveness over a specific campaign timeframe. Overview Campaign reports are based on the messages that have been sent and enable us to see how successful our mailings are as a group. These reports give us complete statistical information on every message we sent, including the number of emails opened, the clickthru rates for each message, and the user profile of each member who was sent an email. Again, this provides us with valuable information as we are planning our next eblast communication.

In marketing, feedback is such an important tool, and that’s why we love eblasts!