The article ‘Why Sending Mass Email with Gmail Doesn’t Work (and What Does)’ Was originally published in 2019. It has been reworked and modernized for 2021.
Mass email campaigns are a powerful tool in a marketer’s arsenal. When planning to launch mass email as a marketing channel, many people find themselves asking “how do I send mass email with Gmail?”
It can be tempting to simply use what you’re already using – Gmail, Outlook or similar platforms. However, there are a number of factors that make them a less than ideal choice.
If you’re planning on using mass email marketing, it pays to know exactly what factors are in play and what will and won’t work for you.
The Key Issues
The first reason that you can’t send mass email with Gmail or other common email providers is simple: they don’t allow it.
Most email platforms have a cap on how many emails can be sent in a given period of time. Gmail, for example, has a limit of 500 emails in a day (or 500 recipients in a single email).
If you’re working with a large contact list, many platforms won’t even let you upload the full list at all. There’s a simple reason for this.
Every IP address and domain has a sender score associated with it. This is a metric that internet service providers (ISPs) use to determine how trustworthy your emails are, and how likely they are to be spam.
Many providers share IPs and domains across multiple clients. If one customer sends out a huge email blast that gets flagged as spam, it could impact other customers as well. To prevent this, large email lists and sends simply aren’t permitted.
Why Add-Ons Don’t Cut It Either
Even using third-party tools to raise the cap only gets you so far. Raising your daily limit to, say, 2000 emails is a step up, but not enough to really bring value.
The true value of mass email campaigns is in the mass part of the name. Mass email campaigns and opted-in campaigns are fundamentally different.
While you can expect strong open and click rates from a list of people who have opted in to your mailing, the same can’t be said for cold mass emails. Open and click rates are drastically lower.
The difference is, while your subscription list might be a few hundred or even a couple thousand people, with mass cold email you can send to hundreds of thousands of people at once. The lower open and click rates are made up for by the sheer volume of your audience.
Despite the lower benchmarks for engagement, the actual number of leads you can generate with mass email is immense.
What to Do Instead
If you’re planning on using mass email, the best thing to do is to commit to the channel. Purchase a list of appropriately-targeted addresses from a reputable data provider.
Since the usual email services don’t work for proper mass email, you need an email platform specifically designed for the task.
A major part of properly executing a mass email campaign is the technical side of it: recipient list verification, IP/domain sender score management, ensuring your message doesn’t have typical features that set off spam filters, and so on.
With that in mind, Clickback is the tool of choice. It handles the technical side for you, so you can focus on your campaign.
For example, any email list deteriorates over time, as people leave jobs, change addresses, and so on. Addresses become invalid or inactive, or are repurposed as spam traps and honeypots. For this reason, it’s absolutely critical that you run your list through an email list verification service before you send.
Clickback has one built in – a powerful, robust series of hygiene checks that clean out bad addresses and spam traps automatically when you upload your list. No third-party service necessary.
It also uses its own proprietary IP addresses and domains when you send, so your sender score remains pristine.
There’s no limit on how many contacts you can upload and send to, and Clickback’s unique features ensure your campaigns have maximum deliverability.
See just how it can take your campaigns to the next level – book a free demo with one of our experts.
