How to Send Bulk Email in Gmail: A Step-by-Step Guide

Emails play an essential role in business communication mainly because it is one of the most important channels for business professionals to communicate with their customers/clients and vice versa.

Irrespective of the industry or scope of your business, emails are one form of communication that allows you to send messages across the world within a short period, as short as in seconds, and from virtually anywhere.

Aside from their role in business communication, emails also serve as an important channel for digital marketing known as email marketing. Email marketing has grown in recent years to become a highly effective and revenue-generating channel that a lot of businesses use nowadays to reach out to their customers and promote their products or services.

To make email marketing a lot more effective and generate better results, some companies make use of various email marketing software to send large email campaigns to their target audience effectively and to get more results.

However, not all companies have the financial capacity to use more sophisticated email marketing software to send bulk email campaigns which is why some still use free email service providers like Gmail or Outlook to send bulk emails

This article has provided valuable insights on ways you can send mass emails in Gmail, guidelines for Google, best practices for sending bulk email campaigns with Gmail, and how you can use GMass to transform Gmail into a powerful and functional mass email software.

Table of Contents

• What is a Bulk Email?
• Bulk Emails in Gmail
• Benefits of Sending Mass Emails in Gmail
• Common Problems with Sending Mass Emails from a Gmail account
• How to Send Mass Emails in Gmail?
• Advanced Features For Gmail Bulk Email Campaigns
• Best Practices for Sending Mass Email Campaigns

What is a Bulk Email?

A bulk email otherwise known as mass email or email blasts is an email usually a marketing email sent by a brand to a large group of recipients at once.

They are usually used in digital marketing campaigns to send mass marketing messages, newsletters, coupons, updates, or invitations to a large group of subscribers to promote a business, product, or service. The ultimate goal of bulk email is to promote a business, sell a product or service and build and nurture relationships with customers.

In today’s marketing, a lot of marketing professionals use bulk email service providers to send important business messages with little effort. The key things you need to send mass emails are a list of opted-in subscribers and email marketing platforms or a free email service provider.

Unlike spam messages that are regarded as illegal, unethical, and invasive because they are sent without the recipient’s permission, bulk emails are legal marketing campaigns that are forwarded to subscribed recipients.

For this reason, it is important to adhere to the CAN-SPAM Act to avoid penalties and cause harm to your business when creating and sending bulk email campaigns.

Bulk Emails in Gmail

Gmail is an excellent email service that has been relied on by businesses over the years for personal communication. However, with the latest updates provided by Google have offered more in-depth and resourceful apps like Google Drive, Google Classroom, and Google Docs, businesses are constantly looking for ways to connect with their customers more than ever.

The main advantage of using Gmail as their email service is that it is free, and secure and offers many tools to make communication easier for individuals and businesses.

The downside of using Gmail is the constraints for sending daily bulk emails as free Gmail users are permitted to send a maximum of 500 emails while Google workspace users can send a maximum of 2000 emails per day and other Gmail bulk sender guidelines. Failure to adhere to these rules could risk getting blocked from sending emails.

Fortunately, Google also introduced GMass to make bulk email marketing a lot better with fewer constraints. GMass can help you override the Gmail sending limits and allow you to send mass email campaigns to thousands of email recipients at a go.

GMass can also help businesses manage their bulk emails more effectively, improve email deliverability and increase conversions by making the tools you need to send email marketing campaigns with Gmail. Check out the detailed guide about email marketing metrics.

Benefits of Sending Mass Emails in Gmail

One of the biggest benefits of sending mass emails in Gmail is that it delivers the messages to the right folders in the recipient’s email. For instance, if you use email marketing software like Mailchimp, Sender, Sendgrid, Constant Contact, etc., Gmail sort the bulk messages from these email marketing software in a “Promotions” or “Other” folder.

In addition to these, many email marketing platforms such as Mailjet, Sendinblue, etc., use IP addresses that are being used by many people to send emails, and if that IP address has been flagged down by Gmail spam filters due to spam complaints from other senders, the IP address credibility is automatically ruined.

With these IP addresses, even if you send solicited messages using those IP addresses, they will be automatically sent to the email recipient’s spam folder. To avoid these issues, sending an email marketing campaign with Gmail’s IP address will give you better deliverability – getting your email to the right folder in your recipient’s inbox.

If you send bulk emails from your Gmail account using GMass, you get to send the marketing campaign using Gmail’s IP address – one of the most reputable and widely used IP addresses in the world. GMass also enables marketers to incorporate personalization in the emails and manage the individual distribution of their bulk emails.

Overall, using GMass for your bulk emails in Gmail can help you get a higher email delivery rate and increase your conversions.

Common Problems with Sending Mass Emails from a Gmail account

1. Gmail’s daily sending limit

As emphasized earlier, Gmail has set some limits to the daily email sending capability on the platform. The Gmail and Google Workspace free and trial account respectively has a daily sending limit of 500 emails while the Google Workspace paid account has a daily limit of 2000 emails.

If a user exceeds this daily limit of 500 and 2000 emails on Gmail and Google Workspace respectively in a day, Gmail will automatically block the email with an error message which only gets reset after 24 hours.

2. Limitation on new Gmail accounts

According to Gmail guidelines, a new Gmail account will not be able to send the required 500 emails per day as this goes against the rules for new Gmail accounts. If a new Gmail sends up to 500 emails per day, they may be delivered to spam folders or blocked by Gmail.

Gmail recommends sending low volumes of emails per day and gradually increasing it over time, and maintaining a consistent rate of emails instead of sending in bulk.

3. Gmail has deliverability issues

If you blind copy your mass email campaign to a large list of recipients in Gmail, your messages can trigger spam filters of the recipient’s email service. The issue with this is that your mass email may be deemed spam by up to 21% of your recipient’s spam filters.

4. Lack of email personalization

A major issue with sending mass emails with Gmail is that it doesn’t allow for the personalization of the emails. However, when it comes to email marketing, personalization is of utmost importance as this enables businesses to connect with their email recipients in a personal and more connected way.

It would be hard to get good results from your email marketing campaigns if you fail to personalize your emails. According to a report from Snov.io, sending personalized emails can help you increase your open rate by 82%, your Click-through rate by 75%, and customer satisfaction by 58%.

5. Email scheduling and automation

In email marketing software, marketers can schedule and automate their email campaigns when sending, however with Gmail, you won’t be able to test your email campaigns to see if it looks good and is compatible with various devices before sending them out to the recipients.

Additionally, it’s also difficult to set or schedule the email before time to make the process a bit faster and less stressful.

6. Email tracking and analytics

Email tracking enables marketers to track how the email is performing with regards to its open rate, and click rate and ultimately helps you determine what’s working for you and what’s not working for you. Sadly, sending bulk emails with Gmail doesn’t allow marketers to track emails using reporting dashboard.

How to Send Mass Email in Gmail?

Although sending bulk emails in Gmail has so many constraints, it is not impossible to send bulk emails using Gmail. However, before starting, you will need to create a free Google account and install a free mail merge extension.

The step-by-step guide to sending mass emails in Gmail is as follows:

Step 1: Create a Google account

The first step to sending a mass email campaign in Gmail is creating your Gmail account, if you don’t already have one or use the existing Gmail account you already have to send your email campaigns to your email subscribers.

Step 2: Install a Mail merge extension

Mail merge is a feature with data processing applications that enables you to get data from a database, spreadsheet/google sheets, or other forms of structured data such as a CSV file and insert them into documents such as letters, mailing labels, and name tags.

Mail merge enables marketers to send personalized mass emails by connecting personal data taken from the subscriber’s list like the email addresses, first name, and business address.

You will also need to install the Google Workspace extension to add mail merge features to be able to send mass emails in Gmail.

Step 3: Build your email list

After installing the mail merge, the next step is to set up your email list. You can achieve this by using your Gmail contacts to create a mailing list. Alternatively, you can use google contacts to export some of your contacts in a CSV file and then upload the CSV file to a Google spreadsheet.

Step 4: Set up your Google spreadsheets

The next step is to create a google spreadsheet in plain text for GMass by ensuring that you properly format the rows and columns for optimal results.

The first row must contain names such as FirstName, LastName, EmailAddress, Company, etc., in that exact order without spacing. After this, you must ensure the second row starts with the data.

Step 5: Log into your Gmail account and connect the Google spreadsheet with GMass

When you log in and open your Gmail account, you will see a “Google Sheets” symbol next to the Gmail search box. After this, you will get a pop-up with a dropdown of spreadsheets to choose from for your campaign. Following this, you will the spreadsheet, and get access to a full list of all the recipients.

Step 6: Personalize your email

Email personalization is undoubtedly the best email marketing practice that a lot of marketers use to connect with their audeince on a personal level and encourage higher open and conversion rates.

So for example, for the email greeting, instead of just “Hi”, you can have “Hi Zee”. To do this, simply insert the column “Name” after the greeting to personalize the email.

Step 7: Click on the Gmass button to send a mail merge

After you have finished drafting and personalizing your email campaign, you can click on the Gmass button to send the email immediately or at a later time depending on how you want to schedule the emails.

Advanced Features For Gmail Bulk Email Campaigns

GMass also provides some more advanced features to send better bulk email campaigns in Gmail. These features include:

1. Advanced Personalization in Gmail

An underlying problem with bulk emails is the majority of them are not personalized majorly because the emails are sent to a large group of recipients, hence it becomes a lot harder to connect with them. It would be almost impossible to send personalized emails individually to an extensive mailing list.

However, with GMass, you get features like Auto First Name Detection, the option to add Personalized links, Personalized paragraphs, images, content, and attachment.

2. Automatic Follow-ups in Gmail

Email marketing has so many sides to it, a lot of time when you send emails to your contact list, they might not all respond to you, which explains why follow-ups are important to achieve a successful email marketing campaign.

Gmass enables you to automate your email follow-ups and customize every aspect of your emails for better performance. You can select how frequently you want to send follow-ups, limit the number of recipients, and can help you personalize every one of your follow-up emails. Check out the guide for follow-up email samples.

3. Gmail Automation and Email Scheduling

It can be stressful to manually add every new subscriber to your email contact list, however, with GMass you can automate this process of adding new subscribers and automate follow-ups, and set up an auto-responder for the emails.

4. Get Around Gmail Sending Limits

As emphasized earlier, Gmail only allows users to send 500 emails per day whereby the Google Workspace account allows users to send 2000 emails within 24 hours.

However, one of the biggest benefits of using GMass in Gmail is that allows you to send 10,000 emails, although it divides the emails into multiple days based on the Google accounts sending limits.

5. Dedicated Reporting Dashboard

Unlike Gmail which gives very limited features, GMass provides users with a dedicated reporting dashboard that you can use to track and manage the performance of your Gmail bulk email campaigns.

Best Practices for Sending Mass Email Campaigns

To achieve impressive results from your mass email campaigns, you must adhere to the following best practices for sending mass email campaigns in Gmail.

1. Craft quality email campaign copy

The ultimate goal of sending email campaigns to your target customers is to promote your business and sell your products or services. For this reason, you must ensure you create a high-quality email copy that effectively showcases your product or service and promote them in a way that persuades your recipients to patronize you.

To achieve this, you must ensure that you keep your email body short and straight to the point. Avoid including spam-triggering words and personalize the emails as best as you can to help your recipients connect with you.

2. Avoid buying email lists from other companies

The worst thing you can do for yourself is to buy email lists from external companies as this can go against legal email marketing practices.

Aside from the risk of sending your emails to invalid email addresses, you also risk sending your emails to people who have not permitted to receive your emails. This can also increase your email bounce rate. Avoid these email marketing mistakes while doing the campaign.

3. Get your recipient’s permission using a double opt-in

When your potential subscribers or customers submit their email addresses to you online via your website or content, consider sending them a confirmation mail to formally request their permission to be added to your email list and receive your emails.

By doing this, you can create your list of authentic email addresses that want your emails, to reduce your email bounce rate.

4. Keep your email list clean

If you want your emails to get to your recipient’s inbox, you have to constantly update your email lists to delete inactive emails, duplicate email addresses, or shared email addresses in your mailing list.

5. Avoid Shared IP addresses

Using the shared IP addresses, especially the ones that have been flagged down for spammy activities, can ruin your chances of success and make your emails be sent to a spam folder.

6. Set up a valid DNS record

Be sure to set up valid reverse DNS records of your IP addresses that are related to your domain.

7. Ensure your domain has the right authentication

Make sure that your domain has authentications like SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record, DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signing, and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) record.

8. Use a custom tracking domain

Using a custom tracking domain can improve your email deliverability and help you avoid spam filters.

9. Always add an unsubscribe link or button

Not everyone will like your emails and want to receive them, as a result, always makes sure you add an unsubscribe link or button to your email to enable subscribers who lose interest to unsubscribe. Check out the easiest guide for how to find someone email address.

Conclusion

It can be a bit difficult to send bulk emails in Gmail and get your desired results because of the restrictions and limitations. To bypass Gmail limits, consider using GMass to enable you to create and send effective bulk email campaigns with advanced email marketing features.