What if you just sent better emails?

The humble broadcast.

Whether you call it a broadcast, newsletter, campaign or batch send, the broadcast is the backbone—and typically the unsung hero—of all messaging strategies.

As marketers, we’re always on the hunt for the next best thing. An idea or tool that will give us an edge over your competition and get you in front of your market more effectively.

…but this often means overlooking improvements you can make to what you’re already doing. In the fervor of “what next” we often miss “more effective”.

So, in this post, I’m here to give you a few frameworks to make sure you’re maximising your broadcasts.

Understand how many of your customers you really reach by calculating your Reach Ratio.
The four types of broadcast, to understand where you’re missing opportunities.
A personalization matrix to generate new ideas for personalizing your campaigns.

The case for broadcasts: capture, reactivate and inspire

Broadcasts vs. automations. These are the two types of messaging campaigns on which you can spend your time. Broadcasts are really powerful because they can help you:

Inspire trust, community, or curiosity. This is stuff that automation just doesn’t do as well! The original broadcasts were “newsletters”: fully driven by editorial and this aspect of broadcasts is still so powerful in building a community. In educating. In inspiring. In bringing your recipients along for the ride.
Capture attention at scale. When releasing new features or sharing big takes or bold launches, newsletters can help you proactively reach your entire audience.
Reactivate segments of your userbase that automation can miss. Inactive users is the most obvious example but, depending on your areas of focus in automations, there could be many pockets of users that you don’t message regularly enough.
Get fast feedback. When you want to test an idea, an angle or a verified A/B test, fast feedback loops on opens, clicks and conversions are one of the benefits of the big reach of broadcasts (versus automations).
Reset the narrative when you need to. Broadcasts are fully proactive, giving you a means to address customers proactively and to re-align around a new strategic direction or other initiative.

Calculate your Reach Ratio

Here’s how you calculate your reach ratio:

Reach ratio = Total recipients of campaigns per period / Average total addressable audience during period

Most brands don’t realise how few customers they actually reach in a given month. For many it’s under 30%, even when they think they’re “sending a lot”.

What is the “average total addressable audience”, you ask? The “addressable audience” is everyone you can actually message. I.e. anyone who is actively opted-in to hear from you minus unsubscribes, hard bounces (for email) or any other “filters”.

To get the "average" addressable audience, we take this and calculate it for each day of the period we’re looking at (e.g. a month) and average it out. This helps us account for new opt-ins and new unsubscribes throughout the period, providing a stable base.

Your ‘average addressable audience’ is calculated by taking daily snapshots of your valid, opted-in list size—excluding unsubscribes, hard bounces, and any manual suppressions—and averaging those values across the period.

When it comes to calculating the reach ratio, the “period” is really important. If you’re a B2B SaaS company, calculating your reach ratio “per day” and then being frustrated it’s only 5% of your audience wouldn’t make sense. Likewise, calculating your reach ratio as “every five years” and seeing 100% of your audience wouldn’t make sense either.

A rough guide based on my experience:

B2B SaaS: monthly or quarterly
eCommerce and retail: weekly or monthly
Media and publishers: weekly or daily

There is no correct reach ratio. It really depends on your business, the nature of your buying cycle and so on. It’s meant to give you a tool to assess your progress and motivate change.

Where are you when it comes to your reach?

When it comes to reach, the following matrix gives you a way to think about the stage your business is at when it comes to reaching your users.

Stage	Approach	Common Traits	Risks / Limits
1. Random	Ad-hoc newsletters, no real strategy or rhythm	No clear audience strategy; sometimes reactive, but not consistently	Inconsistent experience, missed opportunities
2. Cautious	Send only to “engaged” or “safe” segments	Low unsubscribe rates, but low total reach	Most of your list never hears from you
3. Confident	Broad reach with light tailoring	Include most customers, some segmentation by plan or status for personalization	Needs good quality content to avoid unsubscription fatigue
4. Strategic	Full list coverage with dynamic content	Newsletter as a core marketing engine. Regular personalization in-place

It’s key to get a balance between deliverability, which often involves being narrower about who we email, and reach, which generally results in a challenge of going wider. One way to help with this is to think about the different types of broadcast you can send, which we’ll dive into below. Some types, like your regular, “heartbeat”-style broadcasts are best sent to a narrow, engaged audience. Whilst others, like “opportunistic and topical” broadcasts, provide a way to reach a wider audience with relative safety.

Four types of broadcast

From my experience working with thousands of businesses over the last decade, here is how I think about the types of broadcasts you can send.

Type	Driver	Example	Frequency
🫀 Heartbeat	Product or team cadence	Release notes, changelogs, digests, weekly product updates	Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly
🎉 Event-based	External calendar triggers	Black Friday, EOFY, national holidays	3–6 times/year
💡Opportunistic and topical	Current events, trends, memes	Industry news, hot-takes, timely opinions	Ad-hoc, high-impact
🎯 Strategic and thematic	Big bets and campaigns	Brand stories, major launches, repositioning	Quarterly, annually or tied to strategic goals

Once you’ve got this framework in your head it really helps generate ideas for where you might find more reach or where your campaigns might be underperforming.

For example, it might make sense to take a more conservative view with regular, heartbeat-style broadcasts and only send these to recently or heavily engaged users. Whilst event-based or opportunistic broadcasts provide an opportunity to go broader, bolder and reach users you may not have communicated with for some time.

“Opportunitistic and topical” broadcasts are, in particular, regularly underrated and overlooked by teams. Part of the reason for this is that, to react quickly requires having a fast, thorough process for QA and “go live” for any campaign. This is difficult for many teams to achieve and highlights the importance of building a repeatable, scalable deployment process for sending broadcasts, thinking about things like:

Design libraries and systems. Using snippets and other tools to make it easy to build consistent, on-brand campaigns.
QA. Leveraging tools like Litmus to quickly and reliably test campaigns and find issues.
Scheduling. Get ahead of your regular sends and queue them up weeks or even months in advance.
API-first personalization. Using tools like Vero’s own Data Feeds helps you pull in data to personalize regular campaigns and further put them on auto-pilot.

Personalization matrix

Another tool to help you think about how you might increase your reach is this personalization matrix.

One of the reasons we might shy away from sending a broadcast is the belief that what we’re sending isn’t relevant enough. That’s where personalization comes in.

Automation is very helpful in targeting messages to the right person at the right time. But personalizing the content of a broadcast can be just as effective and ensure users get relevant messages.

On the other hand, sometimes we shouldn’t personalize at all! A clever campaign spun up in response to a popular meme probably doesn’t call for personalization: it will still be super relevant as long as it’s well-timed and in line with the trends your audience is seeing. In fact, spending time on personalization may just slow down getting this campaign out-the-door, resulting in it losing its thunder.

As broadcasts cover so many use cases, sometimes it makes sense to personalize and sometimes it does not. In contrast to the above, if we’re sending a weekly email to our engaged users featuring products in our store, this is a really prime case for deep personalization. Showing products the recipient has engaged with—has in their cart or on their wishlist, for example—or products with a close affinity to those they’ve engaged with—e.g. they’re from the same brand—makes a ton of sense.

And, sometimes, simple segmentation based on geography or lifecycle stage or some other relatively basic segment, is all you need to personalize a campaign: finding a pocket of recipients that have not been messaged for some time and messaging them in slightly different ways, or digging up users who can relate to a specific campaign idea you have.

This little framework helps you think about where any given campaign, or your overall strategy, is at when it comes to personalization.

	Low editorial effort	High editorial effort
Low data use	Generic sends (no personalization)	Segmented editorial (e.g. by geography or plan)
High data use	Token-based (first name, plan)	Fully personalized content (recommendations, usage-based CTAs)

You can label these four quadrants:

Broadcast basics – everyone gets the same.
Smart segments – light data, different content.
Personal – same content, some personal flair.
Tailored – high effort, high return.

As above, it doesn’t always make sense to send tailored broadcasts with heavy personalization, but considering how you might use more personalization to reach underserved recipients is a useful reflection. Not all of your campapigns need to live in quadrant four but if none of your campaigns are personalized then this may reveal some opportunities for new campaigns.

Bringing it all together

We’ve looked at calculating a Reach Ratio to get you thinking about pockets of your user base that you might be undeserving. The framework we provided helps you think about where you are on the scale of sending.

The “Four types of broadcast” and “Personalization matrix” give you simple tools to generate new ideas for what you could send to any underserved pockets, or where you might generate more opportunities from already-engaged recipients.

Audit your last 10-20 campaigns and think about where your company sits in the frameworks above. Hopefully this generates some fresh ideas (and energy) to level-up your broadcasts!

Let me know what other types of broadcasts you send? What have I missed?