Should I send a COVID-19 Email?

As you all are aware of worldwide risk COVID-19 due to which the world’s business has almost stopped. Your business may have impacted also. In this sensitive, you should not make more trouble for your customers and subscribers.

So the quick answer is, “Probably not”.

WHY NOT?

1. Unless you are directly linked to the CDC or WHO, people are not looking to your brand for information on the virus. You’re contributing to inbox clutter and general noise, which can prevent critical updates from reaching your recipients. Sometimes, the best thing to do is take a step back.
2. Many are seeing it as a thinly veiled attempt for a business to use COVID-19 to generate attention and to perform virtue-signaling. How genuinely useful to your subscribers is an email that says “We’re all in this together”? How genuinely useful is 100 emails in your inbox that have effectively that same message? Would you, personally, miss hearing about how Company A is sending thoughts and good vibes? Probably not. If you’re sending an email that’s following the trend of “Our hearts go out to all affected, we have a great product, our employees are working from home and can take PTO”, you’re doing what everyone else is doing and don’t need to be emailing about it. It’s just not worth sending that email and potentially contributing to negative brand perception.
3. You can cause significant harm to your email deliverability. I’ve seen an uncomfortably high number of cases where leadership at a company lacks an understanding of the importance of email reputation and demands an email out to their entire mailable database. Reputation systems do not stop for a crisis email. If you suddenly up and decide to send to your entire database of millions of addresses after not engaging with that database, how many bounces are you going to get? How old is that list? You’re risking high bounce rates, high spam complaint rates, and high unsubscribe rates for an email that isn’t critically important to send.

IF I SHOULDN’T SEND A COVID-19 EMAIL, BUT I WANT TO SEND THE MESSAGE THAT I’M HAVING EMPLOYEES WORK FROM HOME AND CAN TAKE PTO, WHAT SHOULD I DO?

There are other channels to get a message across without sending an email. Consider an alert on your website with information on what you’re doing. Share it on social media. Blog about it. If you have an online product, put a note about it somewhere in your app, perhaps on the login page.