Author: Franz Malten Buemann

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When it comes to email marketing, there’s no denying how powerful this channel can be.
According to a 2019 Campaign Monitor report, for every $1 you spend, you earn $42 – an astonishing return on investment.

If you’re scaling a business, you may have relied on personal or business email providers like Gmail and Outlook in the past. However, they’re not equipped to manage large volumes of email and provide the data needed to track performance.
That’s where a bulk email service can come in.
Discover the key features you should find in a bulk email service and the top providers in the market.
A mass email service helps you reach a large audience and nurture them one email at a time. In addition to getting direct access to your customer base, you can also track how your emails perform and test various methods to increase clicks and conversions.
While traditional advertising methods, such as print ads and direct mail, can have high return on investment (ROI), it can be difficult to understand how consumers are interacting with your materials. With a bulk email service, you can find out what attracts consumers and what elements lead to higher conversions.
Furthermore, many bulk email services offer automation tools – think workflows and sequences – to help you move leads down the funnel and retain your current clients.
Using a personal or business email can work in the first few months of starting a business but will quickly become ineffective as you grow.
Reasons to Send Bulk Emails
Not sure if it’s the right time to try a bulk email service? The first question you should ask is, “Is our brand investing in email marketing this quarter/year?”
If the answer is yes, then that’s your sign to invest in an email service.
Here are specific examples of when you would send out a mass email to your subscribers:

Sales promotion – Say you want to promote discounts on certain products or services, sending a mass email to your subscribers is a great way to generate sales.

Newsletter – Do you want to send out exclusive content to your subscribers? Then a newsletter is the way to go.

Product updates – A great way to announce a new product feature or line is via email. You can include previews to build some excitement and include calls-to-action (CTA) for conversions.

Announcements – Are you updating your hours, prices, or services? Or perhaps there’s been a change in your policy. Notifying your subscribers in an email blast is an effective way to spread the news.

With every email you send to subscribers, you’ll want to keep in mind your goals, your audience, the time and day, personalization, and compliance with data protection laws.
You want to invest in an email marketing service, but you’re not sure what to look for – here’s your guide.
These are the key features you should look for in a bulk email service. Some of these features will only be available in a premium package. However, others will be included in the standard or free versions.
1. User Behavior Tracking
The number one tool you’ll need in any bulk email service you select is reporting capabilities. Because what’s the point of investing your time in designing and sending emails if you can’t see how they performed?
You should be able to track key email metrics, such as:

Open rate
Unique clicks

Click-to-open rate (CTOR)
Clickthrough rate (CTR)
Unsubscribe rate
List growth rate
Bounce rate

Email providers with advanced reporting features may also allow you to track revenue per subscriber and revenue per email.
2. Drag-and-Drop

A drag-and-drop tool makes designing your email easy. This intuitive feature allows you to select an element from the sidebar, like an image, quote, or button, and drag it to a section in your email.
This will save you time as you determine the best flow for your email and move things around.
3. Email Segmentation & Personalization
Segmenting your emails ensures that your emails are reaching the right people at the right time.
You should look for a bulk email service that allows you to segment your subscriber list based on:

Location
Actions taken in the email
Purchase history
Type of subscriber (ex: prospect vs current customer)

When you segment your list, you can get higher engagement rates, as the content will be more relevant to your recipients.
4. Split Testing
Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a great way to understand what resonates with your audience.

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This feature is particularly helpful if you are struggling to generate high open rates and get subscribers to convert.
By testing out different subject lines and elements within the body of your email, you can determine what works best.
5. Automation
When you’re scaling your email list, the name of the game is automation.
Say you have a content offer and you want to send a sequence of emails to leads after they’ve downloaded the offer. With an automation tool, you can pre-select which emails will go out, in what order, and how many days in each email.

Once you complete the set-up, the automation does all the work for you – nurturing your subscribers and moving them down the buyer’s journey.
This hands-off approach allows you to focus on strategy instead of the tedious work of sending out emails. It can also become impossible to keep track of each subscriber’s stage in the journey and send the appropriate email.
With automation, you can take the guesswork out of the process.
6. Design Templates
If you’re like me, designing isn’t your forte. So, when designing an email, you’ll take all the help you can get.

Having a design template based on the type of email you want to send can not only save you time but ensure you’re following email best practices. This is particularly helpful if you have limited experience designing emails and are just starting out.
What’s great about having a template is that it’s a foundation. You can customize it to fit your needs, but it provides a blueprint from which to work.
7. High Email Delivery Rates
Imagine you work so hard on an email campaign, and it never reaches your subscribers’ inboxes. Frustrating right?
That’s why it’s important to verify your provider’s email delivery rates. You’ll want to select a service with high email delivery rates, as close to 100% as possible.
Best Bulk Email Services
1. HubSpot’s Email Marketing Tool

With HubSpot, you can create, customize and optimize your emails without any coding or design experience.

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You can send up to 2,000 emails a month, and that doesn’t include test emails to check functionality. The platform offers a user-friendly interface and tools like a drag-and-drop tool to easily design your email, tokens to personalize every email, and an a/b testing feature.
In addition, you can create custom reports based on the data you want to collect and analyze.
The best part? It’s free.
2. ConvertKit

As their name suggests, the platform is designed to help you earn more conversions and generate more revenue.
ConvertKit is known for its advanced automation tools, including custom email funnels, smart filters, and link triggers.

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Furthermore, the platform has a 98% delivery rate, ensuring that your emails will always reach your subscribers. In addition, the average open rate for ConvertKit emails is an astonishing 30%, according to their website.
ConvertKit offers a free version of its platform all the way up to custom pricing for enterprise-level businesses with over 365,000 subscribers.
3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a great email service for those who are just starting out in email marketing.

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The platform offers a user-friendly interface and over 100 templates to choose from.
With their free plan, you can send up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 contacts – a great option for small to midsize businesses. As your business grows, you can scale to the premium version, which includes unlimited audiences, multivariate testing, and advanced segmentation with up to 200,000 contacts.
4. Drip

If you have an ecommerce business, consider Drip for your email marketing.
The platform offers pre-built email templates that you can customize to your liking and a user-friendly workflow builder for automation.
In addition, you can schedule automation based on actions your subscribers take. For instance, viewing a product, abandoning their cart, and making a purchase.

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With Drip, you can easily integrate your online store (like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce) to make data gathering easier and help you design more targeted emails.
Pricing starts at $19 and goes up based on how many subscribers you have.
5. Insycle

Insycle doesn’t fall under the email provider list. However, this software does work in tandem with providers like HubSpot and Mailchimp to keep your contact list clean.

One of the downsides of having a subscriber list is the potential for duplicate contacts. This can not only impact your metrics (and consequently your data) but also make it difficult to tailor your emails.
Insycle allows you to clean your contacts in bulk, merge duplicate ones, and avoid overwriting data.
Knowing what to look for in an email service is half the battle. Now that you have a list of key features and few tools to choose from, you can find a platform that helps you grow your email list and generate revenue.

Meet Elizabeth: a 27-year-old nurse who drives a Honda Civic, enjoys making TikToks, and spends most of her time with her beautiful 9-month-old baby.
Elizabeth desperately wants to make more time for herself, but struggles to find the balance between work and home responsibilities. She tries to give herself moments of self-care, but these moments are few and far between. Elizabeth needs a way to recharge, relax, and care for herself.
By this description, you know Elizabeth’s age, profession, gender, desires, struggles, and pain points. All of this information helps you place her in a category in your mind — but none of that information tells you why she buys your product.
Buyer personas typically include descriptions like Elizabeth’s, along with other demographics and personality information.
In the early days of customer segmentation, this would have been more than enough to inform marketing campaigns and product development. But with growing markets and increased consumer awareness, companies need to go beyond standard buyer personas to reach their audiences.
If we can apply what we’ve learned about how people make decisions, and how we as companies group people together, we’ll be able to reach customers like Elizabeth with empathetic solutions that help her, rather than stereotypical cure-alls that are easily overlooked.
Here, let’s dive into three myths of the buyer persona — and what you can do, instead. 

Standard Buyer Personas Aren’t Enough
The first mention of audience segmentation was by Wendell Smith in 1956. Smith defined market segmentation as, “the adjustment of market offerings to consumer or user requirements.”
Smith knew that creating segments would lead to higher consumer/user satisfaction. But Smith’s idea of segmentation was years before we had a clear understanding of psychology, behavioral economics, unconscious bias, and deeper knowledge about how to provide consumer satisfaction.
Since Smith’s discussion on segmentation, we’ve had major discoveries in the way people think, rationalize, and categorize others. Daniel Kahneman and Amos’ Tversky’s 1974 research paper A Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases revealed the way people process information, and are influenced. And Clayton Christensen first shared his jobs-to-be-done theory in 2003.
Both of these studies on human behavior, purchasing, and thinking have made a lasting impact on the way we create ad copy, price products, introduce call-to-actions, and influence many other marketing activities — but have yet to influence our way of creating buyer personas.
Using the lessons from Kahneman, Tversky, and Christensen, there are three myths of the standard buyer persona that could be detrimental to your marketing and customer relations. Let’s dive into those, now. 
Myth #1: Your Buyer Persona Needs a Name
We’ve all seen the old advice to give your persona a name that is memorable. Names like Sally Sales Girl and Mary the Marketer will bring your persona to life and create a more concrete persona in your mind and marketing — or so we’re told.
Fact: Naming your buyer persona introduces bias.
The problem with giving your buyer personas a fake name is that you could introduce bias into your marketing.
Introducing naming bias in your marketing means that consciously you’ve determined a particular person as your best customer. That’s good! The problem is you might also unintentionally exclude people who could be a good fit for your product but may not resemble the person you envisioned. And that’s bad.
If Elizabeth is your best fit customer, then you’re more likely to seek out customers who meet your unconscious idea of who Elizabeth is, rather than seek out customers who actually use your product or service.
Studies show that when someone has an easier-to-pronounce name, they are judged more favorably than someone with a harder-to-pronounce name.  And while most studies on unconscious name bias focus on resumes and job applications, we can apply those lessons to buyer personas, as well.
Ease of pronunciation varies depending on where you live or what language you speak. But remember, a name that sounds familiar to you might not sound familiar to your audience.
Solution: Name personas based on segmentation data.
When we create buyer personas, we’re grouping a large number of people into one category. Instead of naming your personas after a person, try naming them after the traits they share. 
Do the majority of these best-fit customers enjoy soccer? Great! Name them ‘The Soccer Players.’ Or maybe they’re using your product to free-up time in their scheduling processes. Wonderful — let’s call them the Free Timers.

Naming this group of people according to their segment, or their need, helps to eliminate any bias that could exist.

This helps focus buyer personas on the category of people you’re serving, not just one pretend person.
Myth Two: Your Buyer Persona Needs a Photo to Make Them More Relatable and Realistic
Most buyer personas have a stock photo on the first page. I’ve even heard of companies using cardboard cutouts of buyer personas in their office.
While I admire the effort to bring to life a category of people, assigning one picture or person to represent a large group of people lays a foundation for bias in your marketing.
Fact: Your buyer persona doesn’t need a face to be realistic.
The buyer persona’s picture most likely represents who you believe your ideal customer looks like, but it’s not likely a good determination of your entire audience. If you’ve given your Elizabeth persona a picture of a middle-aged white female, and 100% of your audience isn’t middle-aged, white, and female, you’ve inaccurately portrayed your audience. 
When we give our personas a stock photo it could introduce racial, gender, or beauty bias. These kinds of biases are so ingrained in our minds that we follow bias patterns even if we don’t logically believe the bias to be true.
This phenomenon is known as the bias blind spot. Studies show that 95% of cognition happens below the threshold of conscious thought. Meaning, you may not be racist, misogynistic, or ageist, but there are patterns ingrained in your mind that influence your decision-making whether you realize it or not.
A Google Image search when searching for ‘Buyer Personas’ blatantly shows the issue with assigning pictures to buyer personas. There’s not a lot of diversity in these images, and that lack of diversity hurts a company’s growth.

A 2019 survey by the Female Quotient, Ipsos, and Google found “64% of people surveyed said they took some sort of action after seeing an ad that they considered to be diverse or inclusive. Those numbers increase for Latinx+ (85%), Black (79%), Asian/Pacific Islander (79%), LGBTQ (85%), millennial (77%), and teen (76%) consumers.”
Solution: Forget the photo.
Leave the stock photo out of your buyer personas. This isn’t going to harm or hurt any of your marketing efforts and functions. It will be a step toward eliminating unconscious bias. Instead of using a stock photo, get straight to the crucial information.
You may have the urge to add a cartoon character, but that doesn’t alleviate the problem. Skip the pictures altogether, and get straight to the information that will help you resonate, reach, and sell to your customers.
This is the first step in acknowledging that your customers look like a wide variety of races, genders, shapes, and sizes.

When your marketing better represents your audience, your product, messaging, and communications will resonate more clearly.

Myth Three: Buyer Personas Should Describe Character Traits
Most B2B buyer personas are created to inform marketing teams and executives on who their customers are and keep promotional efforts consistent, but limiting buyer personas to only character traits, demographics, and socio-graphic information limits your audience and ability to reach the right people in the right way.
Fact: Buyer personas should tell you why people buy a product or service.
The best way to resonate with your audience is to understand them and empathize with their pain points. Understanding your audience begins with how you build and segment your buyer personas.
If you’re segmenting your audience based on attributes such as brands they like, habits they have, or job titles, then you are grouping people together based on fleeting attributes. 
For instance, say our persona example, Elizabeth, changes jobs, moves to a new city, or changes any trait about her life. As a result, you might unnecessarily shift Elizabeth out of your customer demographic. She loves your product,  and would still buy your product, but now you’re no longer invested in marketing to her segment.
Solution: Segment according to the job-to-be-done.
Instead of building your personas around demographics and character traits, base your personas on what your customers have hired your product/service to do for them.
For example, Elizabeth is a mom, loves long baths, and buys Suave deodorant. The reason she buys Suave has nothing to do with her age, job title, or love of baths. She buys Suave because she’s used it for years, loves the smell, and the way it makes her feel. She is ‘hiring’ Suave deodorant to keep her feeling and smelling great.
Clayton Christensen was the first person to discuss the concept of people hiring products and services for a particular job. 
Combining the emotional psychographic information of buyer personas with a jobs-to-be-done approach will help to inform your marketing efforts and open up your market in a way that allows you to serve all kinds of people. According to Christensen, “Companies that develop offerings centered on jobs, instead of customer attributes and buying behaviors, can excel in the market and avoid disruption.”
The Best Buyer Personas Will be the Tool that Grows Your Business
It’s time buyer personas caught up with our knowledge of how people think, behave, and purchase. When undertaking your next buyer persona project, ditch the fake name and picture, and focus on what your customers hire your product to do for them.
Your marketing deliverables will be more inclusive to a wider audience, while still being narrowly focused and empathetic. Creating better buyer personas will lay a foundation of better marketing practices that resonates with your audience and grows your business.

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