When you Google “mass email marketing”, you’ll find some pretty contradictory information. Two of the headlines at the top of my page: Mass Email Is Dead. Try This Better Marketing Strategy Instead, and Mass Email Marketing Is Not Dead: Tips for Winning.

The former is a 2019 HubSpot article – makes sense that an inbound-marketing platform would take that stance. The latter is a 2021 post by Zendesk.

Both are pretty authoritative voices, but only one of them can be right. So which is it? Trick question: they’re both correct. Mass email marketing is absolutely dead when it comes to B2C, but it’s alive and well in the B2B world.

Why B2B and not B2C?

The simple answer is that CAN-SPAM (the US anti-spam legislation) put an end to B2C mass email marketing, but has provisions for B2B.

In a nutshell (don’t take this as a legal definition), cold email marketing is permissible in a B2B context where you have legitimate reason to believe the recipient has a real potential interest in your offering.

How Does It Compare to Inbound Email?

Honestly? It doesn’t. It’s like comparing apples to oranges, because inbound and outbound email serve different purposes and occur at different stages of a contact’s buyer journey. They work best together.

Today, mass email marketing is a powerful way to generate new leads to go into your funnel, where your marketing automation can nurture them as usual. The big difference is really in scale.

Where inbound marketing is small in scale, often focused on individual contacts or small groups, mass email marketing is all about reaching as much of your target audience as you can.

That means you’re aiming to send campaigns to hundreds of thousands of contacts that match your target audience.

How Does Mass Email Marketing Work?

You need two things to start generating new B2B leads with email:

• A nice, large, targeted list of cold B2B contacts from a reputable provider
• A platform that will let you use that list, and can keep your campaigns out of spam folders

A good list is absolutely critical. If you’re not sending campaigns to the right people, it doesn’t matter how awesome your marketing team is – you won’t get results.

That’s why it’s extremely important to buy the right list from the right vendor. If you’re not sure what makes a good data provider, reach out to us. We partner with a number of them and are happy to refer you.

The second thing you need is software that’ll let you actually use that list. Most contemporary email marketing platforms, such as HubSpot, as well as providers like Gmail, simply don’t allow you to send emails to that many contacts. In fact, many of them outright forbid the use of cold contacts at all.

That makes sense for them, because they share IP addresses and domains across all their customers. That means that if one customer sent a campaign to a bad list, it could impact another customer’s ability to send email.

That’s obviously a problem, so they solve it by simply not allowing those lists in the first place. Which is all well and good, but it means you need a specialized platform.

Sending Mass Emails That Don’t Flop

There’s a fundamental difference between mass email (in the context we’re using it) and spam, but try explaining to a spam filter that “no, really, my campaign is totally CAN-SPAM compliant”. The fact is that when you’re sending a campaign to 100k people, spam filters are going to get very suspicious.

When your campaigns are getting this closely scrutinized, it’s crucial that you don’t give them any reason to think your message is spam. That’s harder than it sounds, because over the years spammers have come up with many ways to trick spam filters. The list of red flags is extremely long – from using the wrong phrasing to certain formatting, even your text-to-image ratio plays a role in determining how trustworthy your message is.

Remember earlier when I mentioned that you need specialized software for this? That’s because email lead generation software takes all those red flags into account.

Clickback handles the vast majority of that for you “under the hood”, and helps you make sure your content is spam-filter-friendly too. It’s a whole new way to generate leads for your funnel. Check it out.