Blasting Impact: Effective Email for Public Outreach

The second facet of a reader’s email context is that recipients get more email than ever. According to research by the Radicati Group published in its email statistics reports, total worldwide emails per day increased 29 percent from 2018 to 2024. That means every message faces more competition for readers’ attention.

“Everyone’s inbox is flooded,” says Kelsey Baker, vice president at Anchorage public relations firm Thompson & Co.

Third, readers increasingly check emails by phone. ZeroBounce’s Into the Inbox: Email Statistics Report 2025 reports that, of 985 respondents, 64 percent checked email on a mobile device. The size of screen shapes the content of the message. “If your emails aren’t easy to read and scroll through on a phone, you’re going to lose people fast,” says Chaloupka.

And the last bit of context is the sometimes invisible interface supplied by the email client, which increasingly limits what gets through. As email volume has grown, clients like Gmail and Yahoo have taken an increasingly assertive role in shaping inboxes. Multiple companies filter messages that look more like marketing into a “Promotions tab.” They may or may not highlight when new messages arrive there, and if they don’t, the message is out of sight, out of mind.

Baker notes that Microsoft Outlook limits images by default. To see them, a user has to click the download button, which has implications for how senders design their messages. Other clients may cut off very long messages unless users click to view the whole message in a new window.

How to Write the Email

Having carefully considered the audience and an email’s goals, the next step is to develop the email itself. Marketing professionals have devised some best practices for the subject line, sender details, body content, and integrating email with other communications.

In all elements of an email, Chaloupka says its best to avoid “spammy” words or phrases. “You want to write like you’re human,” Chaloupka says. Words and phrases to avoid might include “free,” “buy now,” “cash bonus,” or “risk free.” Many email companies provide lists of phrases to avoid as part of their marketing/educational materials.

Starting at the top, give special attention to the subject lines and preview text. “Start with a subject line that makes people want to open the email,” says Chaloupka. Baker agrees: “Subject lines are the first thing that your audience is going to see.”

An effective subject line should concisely say what’s at stake. Pay particular attention to the first few words and characters. Depending on the email client, people may see just part of the subject line, especially on mobile, so the first forty characters of a subject line deserve special focus.

Baker says the preview text that appears below a subject has equal importance. Together, the two provide the main information readers weigh when deciding to open or skip an email.

“If you can’t tell what an email is about in three seconds, you’ve probably lost the reader,” Ullrich says. Strong subject lines and preview text use shorter, simpler words (think “use,” not “utilize”). Capitalization matters, too. Sentence case is preferable for sentence-length statements, but title case is fine for short phrases.

Subject lines shouldn’t include the organization’s name or the current date or month; that information is contained elsewhere in the message. If an email is “not adding value, it’s going to be left unread,” Ullrich says. Skip repeated or nearly identical subject lines, too: this makes it hard to tell messages apart.

When in doubt, try an A/B test to compare versions. Some email clients will do this automatically, but senders can also divide the email list manually, sending one version to group A and the other to group B. Open rates and other metrics will reveal which version did better with readers.

A step down from the subject line, ensure sender details emphasize branding and transparency. For both strong branding and CAN-SPAM Act compliance, the sender field should contain the organization’s name. What if a program like MailChimp wants a sender first and last name? Krysten Demientieff, partner and CEO of Anchorage ad agency Brilliant Media Strategies, usually splits the organization name in two parts.

Send test emails to multiple devices and clients (e.g., Yahoo, Google, and Outlook) to fine-tune how the sender’s name and image display. In most cases, organizations should use their logo as the sender image.

Before trying the recent trend of including or solely using a person’s name as the sender, consider what’s at stake. Using a person’s name could misrepresent the real sender—usually an organization—and thus violate the CAN-SPAM Act.

Also, the people on recipient lists are more likely to know the organization’s name than any person’s. Using an unfamiliar name runs the risk that more people will flag a message as spam, which could lead to blacklisting. Over-relying on human names in the sender field also becomes a problem when personnel change. It’s far better to build brand recognition.

Erik Cufino, who sends about 100 emails a month for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, suggests other ways to personalize an email within the message. The subject line and preview text could be a great place for this, if the person has enough standing. For example:

Subject: “How do we succeed amid tariffs?”

Preview: “Our CEO shares our efforts to support you.”

Baker adds that if someone wanted to use a person’s name as the sender, she would test results more than once. “My sense, personally, is that that might work the first time” but probably not after, she says.

Moving into the body, make sure to keep any “promises” made in the subject line. Clean, clear text should anchor the body of the message. “You want your emails to be very scannable,” says Cufino, who’s sent emails to the academy’s 30,000 members for nearly two decades. Not everyone gets to the end of a long email. Demientieff advises careful consideration about where the most important story appears, for example.

Subheadings and bulleted lists can guide readers through the main points of an email and help them more quickly grasp the high points. They may also inform the AI summaries that more and more email clients generate as part of email display.

Pictures, however, add scroll time and might be turned off in clients like Outlook. When using images, Baker suggests adding alternative text (or “alt tags”) for each picture. This keeps emails accessible for those who may not download pictures.

In most cases, shorter emails do better. “If there’s a whole bunch of information you want or need to give them,” use a link and send readers to your website, Cufino says. At the same time, tell readers enough in the body that they understand the call to read more. Too little text could also trigger a spam filter.

Baker says it’s best to lay out text in the email platform rather than draft a separate document that’s exported as email. File attachments merit even more caution. “Attaching PDFs to an email is usually not recommended,” Chaloupka says. This can affect deliverability or even trigger spam filters. Many email clients don’t even allow attachments. PDFs can also display poorly on mobile devices, especially those with multi-column layouts.

To share a file, consider linking to a cloud-based version. This gives readers more flexibility and lets senders update the online version without changing the link to it.

Lastly, the body content should always include details required for CAN-SPAM compliance. This includes a real physical address and way to opt out of emails. Making this text too small to read contradicts the law’s intention: that recipients can easily unsubscribe.

Testing, Sending, and Analyzing

Writing the email isn’t the last step; test blasts thoroughly to double-check details, links, and how the email displays. Aim for multiple testers in multiple settings. At a minimum, test all hyperlinks. Even a small organization should try to have at least one reader besides the author.

“It’s important to test everything, especially formatting, because what looks great on the desktop might break on mobile,” Chaloupka says. Make sure to view the blast on both desktop and mobile, and ideally on both PC and Mac and Android and iPhone. Baker says it’s also wise to set up a few test accounts like Gmail, Yahoo, and so on.

“Test your email with your phone in dark mode and with different font size settings and see how that looks,” Demientieff says. “Use those tools to help you make emails that are going to work for a wide variety of audiences.”

Once tested, the email is ready to send. Who’s on the recipient list can make the difference between successful outreach and ending up on a blacklist. “If you don’t have an established business relationship that’s under three years old, you should drop that email address,” Cufino says. “That helps keep your email senders’ reputation score high.”

Always review past emails sent to the same list to check for bad addresses. Remove anyone who unsubscribed or to whom an email bounced. Email clients will always report when they can’t deliver a message or don’t recognize an address.

Baker points out that a large list could be segmented. “You might have content that makes sense for multiple audiences, but it should be framed a slightly different way, depending on if you’re sending it to consumers or to a more business audience or to journalists, for example,” she says.

The more personalized the message, the more relevant the email, so a smaller batch of recipients improves the effectiveness of the email.

Once an email goes out, check analytics. For blasts themselves, wait a few days before pulling final reports on things like open and click-through rates. If the message directs people to certain content or products, though, results could appear sooner in website analytics rather than email reports.

Pay careful attention to bounce rates. High bounce notifications from a certain domain indicate “there’s a really good chance you’ve been blacklisted,” Cufino says. He checks these once a week. He also periodically checks email server IP address against certain lists of bad senders. Spamhaus Project maintains one of these. Senders can check their ISP at check.spamhaus.org.

How can a business fix a blacklist? “First you’ve got to find out why you’re blacklisted,” Cufino says. “Basically, you’ve got to stop doing whatever you were doing to get blacklisted.” A remedy might entail contacting a particular domain directly to show proof of validity.

Open rates provide another crucial insight on blast success. If only 10 percent of recipients open a message, Ullrich says, “Can you really say you effectively communicated?” Sending something doesn’t guarantee people will read it. True communication goes beyond mere transmission.

Baker says analytics can also inform other communications. If a social media post really strikes a chord, for example, it might make sense to create a more persistent blog post version or share the social post in an email. “All of your content should work together,” Baker says. “Everything should feel cohesive and help brand recognition.”